CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

At various times I need to make an additional contribution (payment or refund) for an existing membership. eg: Person was charged full rate when they should have been charged concession rate so $15 refund is due.

At the moment I do this via a negative contribution.  Then, as I want the refund to be part of the membership payment history, I go directly to the DB and create the appropriate entry in the membership_payment table which I can do as I am still on 4.4. (This also makes it easier for us to find instances where the something has gone wrong in CiviCRM and we have an online contribution taken and recorded, but no membership created)

This isn't best practice obviously, as directly dabbling in the DB is not a good idea, but at the moment it is the easiest way for this SQL-literate, PHP-illiterate, financially-challenged user to deal with the problem. 

However, from https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-14197 I can see that the membership_payment table has a limited life and anyway,  I am not sure my organisation will always have someone who could be trusted to dabble directly in the DB.

Has any thought ever been given to adding the ability to link a contribution to an existing membership via a a lookup field when a contribution was being entered?

Or would that really only be a quick(?) and dirty workaround for what is probably the real solution of allowing editing of memberships in a similar way to editing of event registrations?