Booking and paying for an exam starts an automatic sequence. Rhythm creates an order for the booking, then registers the exam booking after the order is paid. This article explains that sequence, including why a candidate is charged a retest fee and what happens when the order behind a registration is cancelled.
Before a Booking Can Start
A booking cannot start until Certifications settings are set up in your Rhythm account. Rhythm checks those settings on the booking screen before it creates an order.
Tip
Certifications settings are cached, so the booking screen may not recognize a new settings record right away. If a booking still will not start after you set up Certifications for the first time, wait a short while and try again.
Building the Order
When a candidate books a sitting, Rhythm creates an order for that specific sitting using the fee required by the selected registration process. Rhythm has already checked eligibility, prior results, the retest window, whether the sitting is active, the sitting date, and whether the sitting matches the exam being registered for while deciding what to offer the candidate. See Exam and Sitting Eligibility for those earlier checks.
If the sitting does not have the fee required by the selected process, Rhythm does not create the order and asks you to add that fee to the sitting.
Retest Fee or Regular Fee
When the order uses a retest registration process, Rhythm charges the sitting’s retest fee instead of its regular registration fee. Rhythm does not check the candidate’s actual exam history at this step. If a first-time candidate books through a retest process, they are still charged the retest fee, even though they have never taken the exam before. That charge does not, by itself, mark the registration as a retest.
Tip
If a candidate reports seeing a different retest price in the Portal than the Console shows for the same exam offering, treat that as a discrepancy to investigate. The Console and Portal should show the same configured fee.
When the Order Is Paid
After your order system reports the exam order as paid, Rhythm registers the booking automatically. Keep these details in mind:
- If a paid order line is delivered more than once, such as during a retry, and it does not already point to a saved registration, Rhythm can create a second registration for the same booking.
- If Rhythm can no longer find the sitting named on the order, that line does not create a registration.
- If none of your recorded sittings for the exam names a training provider, the registration created during fulfilment has no training provider. A registration’s training provider always comes from its sitting.
- For sittings whose date comes from an external testing vendor's scheduling notification, Rhythm keeps the full date and time instead of reducing it to a date-only value. If a sitting's time is missing or reset after a reschedule from that source, report it instead of treating it as expected.
For a clear view of who owes what, keep the contact on a course or exam registration, its order, its invoice, and its payment pointed at the same person. When those contacts do not match, the Portal balance for one contact can be misleading. You might see an unpaid invoice even though the payment was applied to a different invoice tied to another person’s registration or order.
Confirmation Email
Rhythm emails a confirmation after the booking is registered, but only when the registration’s process has email confirmations switched on with a template and the order asked for a customer confirmation. Only this automatic fulfilment step sends that email. If you create a registration by hand, create it directly, or create it without an order behind it, Rhythm does not send this confirmation. If none of your sittings for the exam names a training provider, any training provider details the confirmation template would otherwise show are blank.
Identifying and Filling In the Registration
Every new exam registration gets its own identifier and a registration number people can use as a reference. Rhythm also keeps two other parts of the registration up to date:
- The candidate's contact details — name, email, job title, and location — are copied onto the registration so people can find it by those details. This copy happens only when the registration itself is saved, so a later change to the candidate’s contact record does not update an existing registration until that registration is saved again.
- The sitting's date and place are copied onto the registration, but the date is copied only when the registration does not already have one. If you reschedule a sitting later, Rhythm does not move the date already recorded on its registrations. Moving a registration from one sitting to another with a different location type, such as from an in-person site to a remote sitting, can leave both a facility and remote-location detail showing because the earlier detail is not cleared.
Cancelling a Registration
Rhythm cancels a registration through this automatic path only when your order system cancels the order line that paid for it. If you change the registration’s own status to cancelled by hand, Rhythm does not run this process.
Warning
Rhythm does not check a registration’s current status before cancelling it this way. When the order is cancelled, Rhythm changes the registration status to cancelled, even if the registration was passed, failed, marked no-show, or already credited. Rhythm does not clear the score, so it stays on the now-cancelled registration.
An exam registration booked alongside a course registration is cancelled through the course seat cancellation process instead. See How a Course Seat Is Fulfilled, Attended, or Cancelled for that path.
The exam registration record is the only place that tracks whether an exam outcome was used to generate a credited exam result. A historical exam activity, logged separately from a registration, does not carry that information. To confirm credited status, check the actual exam registration instead.
Related
To register a candidate yourself, see Book an Exam in the Portal and Register a Candidate for an Exam from the Console. To learn why a particular exam, process, or sitting is or is not offered before booking gets this far, see Exam and Sitting Eligibility.