Public site & ticketing
Refunds, cancelling a performance, chargebacks, tickets that never arrived, fees, GST and the round-up.
This article covers what happens to the money after a sale. To switch Box Office on and put a show on sale, see Box Office.
See how a production is doing in its Box Office report: tickets sold and revenue, broken down by performance and ticket type. On a reserved performance the report also lists which seats have gone, so you can see at a glance whether the back rows are moving.
Underneath that is every order you've taken. Search it by buyer name or email, filter it by status, and refund any paid order from the button on its row.
Move a booking to another night with Move on its row. The whole booking moves, with the same tickets and price, so there's nothing to pay or refund. On a reserved-seat night you choose a free seat for each ticket. The buyer is emailed their tickets for the new night, and the old ones stop working at the door. A booking can't be moved once someone on it has been checked in, while it's under dispute, or if it holds tickets for more than one night.
Download your orders with Orders (CSV) at the top of Sales: one row per order, with the ticket price, booking fee, refunds and how it was paid, ready for your treasurer. Each performance also has a Door list: everyone with a valid ticket for that night, comps included, sorted by name. Print it, or keep it on a phone, for the buyer whose phone has died.
A refund gives the buyer the ticket price back. The fees aren't refunded. On a $25 ticket from a New Zealand company they paid $26.71 and get $25.00 back.
A change-of-mind refund costs you nothing. You received $25.00 and you return $25.00, so you're square.
At checkout the buyer reads that booking fees are not refunded if they change their mind, and that if the show is cancelled they get back everything they paid, including the booking fee. A cancelled performance works differently. See below.
⚠ A refund comes out of your Stripe balance, and the buyer is not paid until the balance covers it. If Stripe has already paid your takings out to your bank, your balance may be lower than the refund. Stripe then holds the refund until new sales, or money you add, cover it. The refund dialog tells you before you confirm. To keep a buffer while a show is selling, set your Stripe payouts to weekly or manual in your own Stripe dashboard.
On the Sales list, a refund Stripe is holding reads Refund pending: the buyer has not been paid yet. If Stripe gives up, the order reads Refund failed, and your owners and admins get an email. ⚠ A failed refund leaves the tickets cancelled and the buyer unpaid. Contact the buyer and refund them another way.
⚠ Refund here, not in Stripe.
You can refund from your own Stripe dashboard, and it will sync back to Prompter. But Stripe's refund box fills in the whole amount the buyer paid, fees and all. Stripe never returns its own fee, and it doesn't return ours either, so that difference comes out of your pocket. On a $25 ticket from a New Zealand company that's $1.71.
Refunding from the button here returns the ticket price only. If it's already happened, your Sales report will tell you and name the amount. If a performance is cancelled, use Cancel on the performance instead. See below.
If a performance can't go ahead, use Cancel on it under Performances. Prompter:
Before you confirm, it shows how much goes back to buyers, how much Prompter returns to you, whether your Stripe balance covers it, and your own cost: the card processing fee that Stripe keeps. That is about $1 on a $25 ticket. Stripe never returns its fee, on any refund.
A buyer who also has tickets for another night keeps them. Only the cancelled night is refunded.
Buyers who paid cash or on your own EFTPOS can't be refunded through Prompter, because their money never went through it. They're listed under Refunds by hand on the cancelled performance. Refund each one yourself, then mark it refunded there, so your sales and budget stay right.
⚠ A cancelled performance can't go back on sale. Its buyers have been refunded and told. If the show is rescheduled, add a new performance. You also can't pick "Cancelled" from the performance's status list. The Cancel button is the only way, because it's the only way that refunds and tells people.
Your monthly fee invoice shows the fee Prompter returned as a credit in the month it was returned.
To refund part of an order — two of six seats, or one night of a two-night booking — use Refund some on the order's row and tick the tickets to return.
If that leaves a free companion ticket without the ticket it comes with, Prompter names it and offers to cancel it in the same step. It's ticked for you, and you can untick it if the carer is still coming.
A chargeback (Stripe calls it a dispute) is different from a refund. A refund is your decision. A chargeback is the buyer going to their bank and asking for the payment to be reversed, and neither you nor Prompter can decline it.
When one arrives:
You respond in your own Stripe dashboard, not in Prompter. Evidence goes to the bank through Stripe, and there's a deadline, so don't sit on it. Prompter can't argue the case for you. You're the merchant of record, so this is between your company and the buyer's bank.
⚠ Don't try to refund a disputed or charged-back order.
The bank has already taken that money. Refunding on top of it pays the same person twice, out of your balance. Prompter blocks it and tells you why. If you're in Stripe, the same rule applies.
This holds after the case closes too. Losing doesn't give the money back, so refunding a charged-back order is the same mistake at a worse moment.
If you win, the tickets start working again on their own, in the same seats. There's nothing to reissue and nobody to email.
If you lose, the money and the dispute fee are gone, and the seats go back on sale. The tickets are marked charged back, not refunded. Your sales figures keep the two apart, because you have to reconcile against both.
Genuine chargebacks are rare in community theatre. Most are someone not recognising the name on their statement. Your Stripe statement descriptor and the contact details on your buy page are the cheapest protection there is.
This is the most common call a box office gets, and you can answer it yourself.
Open the show's Box Office, find the order in the Orders list, and use:
Try Re-send first. Most of these calls end there. A buyer who can't find their tickets and can't get an answer is the buyer who rings their bank, so a quick re-send heads off a chargeback.
What "Sent" means. It means the email was accepted for delivery, not that it reached an inbox. No system can see that. If it keeps not arriving, check the spelling of the address, then ask the buyer to look in spam.
It also gives you evidence. Prompter records every confirmation it sends for an order. If that buyer does charge back claiming they never received the tickets, that record is what your bank wants to see, and you submit it through Stripe.
Prompter adds a small ticketing fee (2.5%) to tickets sold through Box Office. The rate is the same on every plan, free or paid. You are not charged more for being on the free plan, and upgrading doesn't lower it. Organisations that don't sell tickets through Prompter pay nothing.
The ticket buyer pays the fees, not you. On top of your ticket price they pay one booking fee, shown before they pay. You receive the full face value of every ticket you sell. The booking fee is made of our 2.5% and the payment processing cost.
Buyers see the price with the booking fee included. On the buy page, each ticket shows its all-in price first, for example $26.71 incl. booking fee, with "$25.00 + $1.71 booking fee" underneath, for a $25 ticket from a New Zealand company. An Australian company's buyer sees $26.44, because card processing costs less there. Part of the fee is charged once per order, so someone buying four tickets pays a little less per ticket than that figure, never more.
If you quote ticket prices yourself, on posters or social media, we recommend quoting the price with the booking fee included, the same figure the buy page shows. In Australia, consumer law expects a price shown without a compulsory fee to have the all-in price beside it. This is general guidance, not legal advice.
The buyer sees one booking fee line, never a separate card-processing charge. Australia banned card surcharges on 1 October 2026, and a booking fee that is the same for every payment method is not a surcharge. If you describe your fees anywhere yourself, call it a booking fee too.
The payment processing part depends on where your company is, because that is what Stripe charges the account the money lands in. On a $25 ticket:
| New Zealand | Australia | |
|---|---|---|
| Your ticket price | $25.00 | $25.00 |
| Booking fee (what the buyer sees) | $1.71 | $1.44 |
| · of which our 2.5% | $0.63 | $0.63 |
| · of which payment processing | $1.08 | $0.81 |
| Buyer pays | $26.71 | $26.44 |
| You receive | $25.00 | $25.00 |
Only the payment processing part moves. Our own fee is the same 2.5% wherever you are. Your own Box Office page shows the example for your country.
There's no setting for this and no way to absorb the fees on the buyer's behalf. If you want your patrons to pay a round number, change your ticket price.
That percentage includes GST. It's the percentage actually taken, wherever you are, with nothing added on top. Tax on the tickets you sell is a separate matter and stays yours; see Location and tax for the distinction.
If your organisation is based in New Zealand and the sale was in New Zealand dollars, Sales and Insights both show the GST contained in what Prompter charged you. It's a line under the Prompter fee reading "of the $18.00 charged, $2.35 is New Zealand GST". Prompter takes the fee out of each sale automatically and sends no separate bill, so this line is your record of how much of it was tax.
You won't see that line if your organisation is based outside New Zealand, because no New Zealand GST applies to you. You also won't see it if the sale was in another currency. New Zealand GST is worked out in New Zealand dollars, and Prompter won't guess at an exchange rate.
There's a formal tax invoice too. One document per calendar month, every fee itemised by order, downloadable as a PDF from Organisation ▸ Billing (owner only). It's issued by Prompter Solutions Limited under GST 149333347. It covers only what Prompter charged you. It isn't a record of your ticket income and says nothing about tax on your own sales.
Its GST line says one of three things, depending on you and on the currency:
This is off until you turn it on. An Owner or Admin switches it on at Organisation ▸ Box Office, below the fees panel.
Once it's on, your buyer sees one extra choice on the way to paying. If their total comes to $26.71, Prompter offers them $27.00, and the 29c is a gift to your company. Two larger amounts sit beside it, $28.00 and $29.00, for somebody who wants to give more.
Nothing is ticked for them. "No thanks" is already selected when the page loads, and a buyer who doesn't look at it pays exactly what the tickets cost.
The amounts follow the currency you sell in, so they're whole units of your own money.
All of it. Every cent of a round-up reaches your company.
Prompter's 2.5% is charged on ticket face value, and a gift isn't a ticket. So we take no percentage of a contribution.
Stripe still charges card processing on the whole payment, the gift included, because that's the cost of moving the money. Prompter pays that part out of its own ticket fee. A 29c round-up costs us about a cent and reaches you as 29c.
A refund gives back the ticket price. It does not give back the gift. Somebody who gave you 29c and then couldn't come has still given you 29c.
Contributions must be given freely, with nothing offered in return. If you give supporters something in exchange, this is no longer a gift and your tax treatment may change.
That sentence is on the screen that turns this on, and you confirm it before anything goes live.
A gift generally sits outside GST and VAT. Ticket income doesn't. If you offer something back for it, such as a drink at interval, entry to a draw or a better seat, it stops being a gift and becomes a sale of something. Your tax position moves with it.
Prompter can't advise you on this. Your treasurer or your accountant can. Ask them before you turn it on, not after your first season with it.
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