Once a student pays for a course seat, Rhythm handles the next steps automatically. This article explains how Rhythm fulfills a paid seat, tracks attendance for a virtual course, and reverses a cancellation.
When a Seat Is Paid For
As soon as the order reports a course seat as paid, Rhythm creates the course registration. If the student already started a draft registration, Rhythm turns that draft into the registration. If there is no draft, Rhythm creates the registration from scratch, so the student does not need a saved draft first.
If the order came through your online store, and the store names a default registration process for certification courses, Rhythm records that process on the registration. This replaces any process the student selected on a saved draft. The registration process controls which confirmation, if any, the student receives.
Tip
If you allow pay-later purchases for an on-demand course, the order line item behind that seat can be fulfilled right after the order is created, even before the invoice is paid. Course access follows the fulfilled registration rather than the payment itself, so the student can access the course before payment is collected.
If payment succeeds but Rhythm does not create a registration or link it to the intended student, the payment alone does not grant course access. The learner may have no access and be prompted to purchase again, even though the payment went through.
What Happens Automatically Once the Seat Is Registered
When Rhythm fulfills a paid seat, it completes these steps together:
- Credits are awarded. If the course or specific offering awards credit, the registrant receives that credit during registration. Rhythm awards credit at this point only; it does not recalculate credits later from the registration status. Moving to Completed does not add credit, and moving to No Show does not remove it. If a course or offering has Verify Automatically? turned off, the credit starts as Under Review instead of final, and your staff need to change it to Verified after they confirm the student's attendance or completion.
- Chosen exam sittings are booked. If the student chose one or more exam sittings with the course registration, Rhythm books those sittings now. Rhythm does not re-check eligibility, duplicates, or dates at this stage because those checks happen when the student makes the choices.
- A virtual seat is set up. If the offering is linked to a virtual meeting session, Rhythm registers the student for a personal join link in that session. For a Zoom-hosted session, Zoom typically sends the actual meeting or webinar access link, not Rhythm's standard confirmation email.
- A confirmation email goes out, when the registration's process has confirmations switched on and the student has an email address. If the order specifically declined a confirmation email, Rhythm does not send one. Rhythm still emails a registration that has no order behind it.
- Training-provider billing status is set, when your Rhythm account has training-provider billing switched on and the offering names a provider. A registration created by hand, or through any path other than fulfilling a paid seat, never receives this billing status and is never included on a later training-provider invoice.
- A course-delivery integration is notified, when your account uses one. If your Rhythm account sends course registrations to an integration such as Cadmium or CommPartners for delivery, Rhythm expects to send a registration only after its payment goes through. A registration with a failed payment, or one still in Draft, is not meant to reach that integration.
Tip
If fulfillment runs again for the same seat, such as after a delivery is retried, Rhythm repeats these steps and awards the credits again from scratch. If staff already changed the status of a credit that fulfillment originally created, fulfillment can overwrite that change when it runs again. If a registration is later transferred to a different person, credits that were already awarded stay with the original student, not the new one.
Attendance for Virtual Courses
For a course offering linked to a virtual meeting session, Rhythm marks a registration attended when the student joins that session. Rhythm also records when the student leaves. If the student joins more than once, Rhythm keeps only the latest join time and does the same for the leave time. It does not add separate visits together into a total time attended.
A registration can be marked attended even if it was already cancelled when the student joined, because joining the session triggers attendance regardless of the registration's current status. Rhythm ignores meeting activity from someone who never registered and does not attribute it to anyone.
Cancelling a Paid Seat
Rhythm follows this automatic cancellation path only when the order line that paid for the registration is cancelled. If you change the registration's own status to cancelled by hand, Rhythm does not take the steps below.
Cancelling a paid seat reverses several things at once:
- Any exam registrations booked with it are cancelled, including ones that were already passed or already had results recorded. Those results are lost.
- The student's seat in a linked virtual meeting is released.
- Credits the registration earned are deleted, including credits that were already verified or already applied toward a certification application.
Warning
Cancelling a course registration does not refund the course fee itself. The refund is handled separately when the order line is cancelled. Cancelling the registration and refunding the payment are two different steps.
If an order is cancelled before Rhythm records the registration it paid for, such as when the two events cross, nothing happens on the registration side because there is nothing yet to cancel.
Tip
Instead of cancelling and recreating the whole order, you can often replace one course on an existing registration by opening the order from the registration's 360 page and using Modify Order to change the course selection. If the replacement changes the fee, Rhythm creates a new invoice for the difference unless you override the fees so the change totals $0. Even a $0 modification still creates a new order record, just not a new invoice.
In some cases, especially when a course is attached to an event registration and that link is changed or the course is cancelled, the automatic cancellation path can fail to find the registration it should cancel. When that happens, the course registration is sometimes left in its previous status, often still Registered, instead of moving to Cancelled. If you see a cancelled order with a course registration that still looks active, check the registration's own status and correct it by hand if needed.
Tip
If you cancel an existing course order and create a new one to fix a registration problem, expect the student to register again from the beginning. Cancelling and recreating the order does not carry the original registration's details over to the new one.
Related
For registering and managing course registrations yourself, see Register for a Course and Manage Your Registrations. For the similar automatic process that happens after an exam booking is paid, see How an Exam Booking Becomes a Registration.