Events, rentals & merch: troubleshooting member questions

Symptom-first guide for answering member tickets about event RSVPs, facility (party) rentals, and merch orders.

What's actually happening: most likely their ACH payment was mid-settlement ("processing") at the moment the RSVP or rental was canceled. The cancel itself goes through fine — the RSVP or reservation shows canceled — but the invoice is currently left completely untouched: no automatic void, no automatic credit. This is a known gap in event and facility-rental cancellation (merch orders behave differently — see below).

What to do:

1. Open the household's invoice and check its status. If it's still processing, the ACH hasn't settled yet.

2. Once it settles to paid, issue a manual account credit for the canceled item.

3. If it settles to something else (e.g. failed), no credit is needed. Nothing was actually charged.

What to tell the member: the cancellation went through; the charge is from a payment that was already in flight when they canceled, and it'll be corrected once it clears. Don't promise an instant refund — bond/invoice credits here are account credits, not Stripe refunds, and they take a manual step on staff's side.

This is expected. The two surfaces work differently:

• Merch auto-credits a paid invoice as part of canceling the order. No separate approval step.

• Events and facility rentals leave a paid invoice untouched when canceled. A staff member has to manually issue the credit afterward.

Tell the member the rental cancellation is confirmed, and that the credit is being handled separately by staff. It isn't automatic on that surface the way merch is.

Ticket-by-email isn't live yet. The inbound handling is built in the system, but the DNS cutover to Cloudflare Email Routing for the club's domain hasn't happened, so mail to support@ currently goes nowhere. Tell the member to open a ticket from the portal instead. That's the only path that reaches staff today.

Canceling an event does not automatically cancel the RSVPs on it. If an event was canceled, staff need to go through and cancel each RSVP individually (and handle any refund/credit). It's a manual follow-up step, not automatic. If a member is asking about this, flag it to whoever manages Events so they can work through the RSVP list for that event.

The decline-reason field is only required in the admin form, not enforced by the system underneath. So it's possible for a decline to go out with a blank reason, and the member's email just omits the "Reason:" line entirely. Ask the staff member who declined the request for the actual reason and relay it to the member directly.

• A stuck processing-invoice charge that needs a credit → billing/finance staff.

• A capacity or waitlist dispute (e.g. who should have been offered a freed spot) → the program staff running that event.

• Any of these coming up repeatedly, not as a one-off → flag to engineering; the processing-invoice gap in particular is a known issue, not something to keep patching by hand indefinitely.

• Event RSVP and facility rental cancellations don't handle a processing (mid-settlement ACH) invoice. No automatic void or credit, and nothing surfaces the gap. Merch order cancellation correctly blocks the cancel instead when the invoice is processing.

• Canceling an event does not auto-cancel its RSVPs; this is how the current build works, but it is a common source of "why does this still look open" questions.

• Facility rental decline reasons are not server-enforced and can go out blank.

• Inbound ticket email (support@) is built but not yet live pending DNS cutover.