Refunds and store credit

The rule underneath

Elite Balance follows WooCommerce’s own philosophy: changing an order’s status never moves money by itself. Marking an order Refunded, trashing it, or cancelling it records bookkeeping, but funds only move when a person explicitly refunds. This protects you from the classic wallet plugin failure where a status change silently double-refunds.

Refunding an order to store credit

1. Open the order and create the refund as you normally would (Refund on the order screen). This is WooCommerce’s own refund record and your books’ source of truth.
2. In the Elite Balance panel on the order screen, use Return to the wallet to credit the refunded amount to the customer’s balance as store credit.

The wallet credit is anchored to the real refund record, so the order, the refund, and the ledger entry all reference each other. Running it twice cannot double-credit; the second attempt replays.

Wallet-paid orders

When an order was paid fully or partially from the wallet, the same panel shows exactly how much wallet money the order still owes back (payments minus credits already returned). If a status change created a refund record without the wallet portion moving (the “stranded” case), the panel offers the one-click recovery: Return the outstanding amount to the wallet, anchored to the existing refund.

What status changes actually do

You do this	What happens to wallet money
Mark the order Refunded	Nothing moves. A note reminds you to refund explicitly if you have not.
Trash or cancel an unpaid order	The wallet reservation (hold) is released. No balance changes, because none had moved yet.
Cancel a paid order	Nothing moves. Refund deliberately, then return it to the wallet if you wish.
Delete the plugin	The ledger stays in your database. Uninstalling never deletes money records.

If a customer says “my refund never arrived in my wallet”, open the order: the Elite Balance panel tells you whether the credit happened, and offers the recovery action if it did not.