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April Product Update: When Plans Change!

Make large-scale cancellations faster, less stressful, and more flexible.

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Life happens. Storms roll in. Venues fall through. Attendance drops. Whatever the reason, having to cancel an event — or even part of one — has always been one of the most stressful moments in an event organizer’s year. You’ve got hundreds (or thousands) of attendees to notify, refunds to process one by one, and a whole lot of customer emails to answer.

We built something to fix that.

Today, we’re introducing two new features to Brushfire that work together to make large-scale cancellations faster, less stressful, and more flexible for both you and your attendees: Mass Cancellations and Event Credits.

Mass Cancellations: Cancel in Minutes, Not Days

Until now, canceling attendees meant doing it one order at a time. For small events, that’s manageable. For events with hundreds or thousands of registrations? That’s days of manual work — and a lot of room for error.

Mass Cancellations changes that. From the Manage Attendees or Manage Orders page, you’ll now see a new “Event Cancellation” option. Click it, configure your settings, and Brushfire handles the rest.

 

Here’s what you can do:

 

Choose who gets canceled.
Cancel all attendees at once, or select specific attendee types or add-on types individually. Running a multi-timeslot event? You can cancel individual timeslots without touching the rest.

 

Choose how they get refunded.
You have two options:

  • Issue everyone an Event Credit toward a future event (more on that below)
  • Attempt to refund to the original payment method, with Event Credit as the fallback if the original transaction can’t cover the refund

Choose what happens to your event.
Cancel all attendees and immediately unpublish the event, or keep the event visible while you cancel — the choice is yours.

 

Communicate clearly.
A built-in rich text editor lets you write a cancellation explanation that gets included in every confirmation email your attendees receive. You write it once; they all get it.

Once you confirm, Brushfire queues everything up and processes it automatically — grouping orders, calculating refund amounts, issuing credits, sending emails, and voiding any Spot refund protection enrollments where applicable. You’ll receive a summary email when the process is complete.

 

One note on fees: Brushfire fees are not refunded as part of the cancellation process. This is consistent with how cancellations are handled today.

Event Credits: A Smarter Way to Handle Refunds

Sometimes a refund back to a credit card isn’t the right answer — or isn’t possible. Event Credits give you a flexible alternative: issue a credit that attendees can use toward a future event you host on Brushfire.

Think of it like store credit, purpose-built for event organizers.

 

How Credits Work

When an Event Credit is issued — whether through a mass cancellation, an individual refund, or manually — your attendee receives an email with a unique 12-digit credit code. That code has a balance, and every time they use it, the remaining balance stays on the same code for future use.

When it’s time to check out, attendees enter their code at checkout and it’s applied as a payment method. The full credit balance (or the order total, whichever is less) is applied automatically.

 

Important: Credits must cover the full order total to be used at checkout. Split payment between a credit and another payment method isn’t supported yet — that’s coming in a future update!

 

Flexible by Design

You control the rules for each credit:

  • Where it’s valid — Any event in your organization, specific events, or specific URL keys
  • When it expires — No expiration, a fixed date, or a relative window (like “90 days from issuance”)

You can set these rules per credit, or create Event Credit Templates — reusable presets that you can apply to any future credit. Templates are especially useful when you’re issuing credits in bulk through Mass Cancellations, since every attendee gets a credit built from the same template.

 

Managing Credits on the Dashboard

A new “Event Credits” section in your Brushfire dashboard gives you a full view of every credit issued under your account. You can see balances, view transaction history, and — if an attendee loses their code — resend the credit email directly from the dashboard. Credit codes are always masked to show only the last four digits, so you can manage them safely without worrying about exposure.

How They Work Together

Mass Cancellations and Event Credits were designed as a pair. Here’s a common scenario:

 

  1. You need to cancel a rain-soaked outdoor event with 800 registrations.
  2. You open Mass Cancellations, choose “Attempt refund with Event Credit fallback,” select your preferred credit template, write a message to attendees, and hit submit.
  3. Brushfire attempts to refund everyone who paid by card. Anyone whose original transaction can’t be refunded gets an Event Credit instead.
  4. Each attendee receives a confirmation email with the cancellation note you wrote, plus — if they’re getting a credit — a separate email with their unique credit code and balance.
  5. You receive a summary email with the full breakdown when processing is complete.

What used to take days now takes minutes.

Getting Started

Both features are available now. You’ll find:

 

  • Mass Cancellations on the Manage Attendees and Manage Orders pages of any event
  • Event Credits in your left-hand dashboard navigation, between Promotion Codes and Payment Gateways
  • Event Credit Templates in the same section, under the Templates tab

Need a walkthrough? Check out our help articles:

Or reach out to our support team — we’re happy to walk you through it.

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