CourseStorm Feature Preview: Account Credits

Coming soon for CourseStorm customers: Maintain credits on file for each student that they can use to pay for future classes and offer "store credit" in place of refunds for late cancellations.

Have you ever had a student make a late cancellation and wished that you could put some money on their account without issuing a refund? Or maybe you have gift cards or scholarship balances that you'd like students to use when they register for classes?

Well, you're in luck because soon, you’ll be able to do all of that and more—we're bringing Account Credits to CourseStorm!

How Does it Work?

Using our new Account Credits feature, you’ll be able to maintain credit balances on file for each of your students, allowing them to pull from those funds when they register for classes.

Once the feature is enabled for your site, you'll see a new Manage Credits… item in the actions menu for each student. Click that link and you'll be able to add or remove credits from their Account Credits balance as you see fit. Each entry is marked with your own note to explain the reason for the change and it's tagged with the date, time, and person who made the adjustment.

Refunding to Account Credits

But that's not the only way to add credits to a student account. When refunding, you’ll also have a new option called Destination that you can choose. By default, all refunds are sent back to the student, but if you wish to hold on to those funds, you can change the destination to Account Credits and we'll automatically shift those funds to their digital account where they'll be automatically applied to any future purchase.

Checking Out

During checkout, we'll notify the student if they have any funds on their account and apply them automatically to their purchase. Then, they'll just have to pay the difference.

Gift Cards & Scholarships

Even better, there are other ways to use this new feature that we think you'll really enjoy: gift card balance and scholarships.

You see, you're not just limited to account credits—you can tell CourseStorm to maintain any number of balances for your student, name them whatever you want, and we'll track it all.

So, for example, if you have students who have purchased gift cards from you in the past and you've been maintaining those balances in a spreadsheet and discounting their purchases with promo codes, our new Account Credits feature will be a huge timesaver. All you have to do is create a new custom payment method called "Gift Card" and then Enable Balance Tracking on it. As soon as you do, you'll see a new option to track those balances as well.

Or, if you offer your students dollar-based scholarships, you can create a new custom payment method called "Scholarship", enable balance tracking on it, and track any funds you give them to apply to their registrations.

Reporting

Not only do we track the balances for you, but we'll distinctly mark every penny paid against a registration by the payment method that was used, simplifying your accounting too.

And, if you ever want to see the outstanding balances for all of your students, you can just ask our AI Reporting system and it will produce just the report you're looking for.

Availability

This update will be available to all customers on our All Access plan in Spring 2026!

Thank You

A big thank you goes out to:

• Kit and Catherine from Garrison Art Center
• Robin from Des Moines Playhouse
• AK from Pittsburgh Glass Center
• Athena and Tim from Historic Yellow Springs
• and all other customers who requested this feature!

And a special thank you to team members Brady Charron and Brody Looney who took the lead on this project!