Why Student Refund Shows in Charges

A common question as student refunds begin to flow is "Why is my Student Refund showing in my 'charges'?" We know this can be confusing! To put a technical term on it, this boils down to the accounting principles of debits and credits. To try to be less technical, when you look at your account, there are two options - charges and payments - since most people are more familiar with those terms.

When you have more payments on your account than charges, it creates a negative balance on your account, which usually means you are due a refund. We have to somehow indicate on your account that we have refunded that negative balance to you. In order to balance your account and reflect that we have distributed your refund, we must record the refund in the “charges” column.

Even though the value of your refund appears in the charges column, it is NOT an amount you are being “charged.” It is just the way we have to "balance the books." See below for an example of how we have to use the charges column so the values in the two columns balance out.

Example Student

$2,000 minus the $2,500 would show as Balance Due = - $500 (negative $500)

This student is due a refund of $500 because they submitted a larger payment than needed.

So what would it look like if we posted the Student Refund in the payments column to indicate the refund had been processed? The system is going to think another payment was made!

$2,000 minus the $3,000 (because now there is another $500 in the payments column) would show as Balance Due = - $1,000 (negative $1,000)

So, in order to show on your account that the funds have been refunded to you, it has to show in the charges column as below.

Balance Due = $0 because the account is now recognizing the student has been refunded the overage.