Troubleshooting refunds

When you refund directly back to a client’s credit card that they made the original purchase from, the refund will usually be successful, but they can sometimes fail.

This article outlines these scenarios and provides information on the next steps to try in case of a failed refund.

Successful refund

Upon a successful refund you will see a Refunded status to show that the refund was successful. Please note that refunds are submitted to the customer’s bank immediately, it depends the bank’s processing time on how quickly the refund will appear. Also note if a refund was issued shortly after the original charge, it may appear in the form of a reversal instead of a refund.

All refunds can be viewed from the Sales menu > Refunds tab > select the desired filter criteria, and each refund record also appears in the client’s History tab.

Failed refund

If a refund has failed, a general message will appear below the Refund failed status to show you what might have gone wrong.

In the below example, the refund was declined by the customer’s bank. This normally occurs when the credit card has been blocked and the funds are unable to be returned.

There are several steps you can take to troubleshoot this:

Steps

1. Contact the client and confirm that their credit card is still valid. Sometimes they no longer have the card they used for the purchase or it’s expired, so the refund has failed because this card no longer exists.

2. If they have a new credit card, you can:

   1. Update the client’s credit card number on the client record

   2. Click on the Retry button again within the refund. This is the best option as it prevents credit card chargebacks (ie. bank transaction disputes).

3. If the refund does not go through, then the money is returned to your business via the Payout Report. In this case, you'll need to:

   1. Transfer the refund manually to them (e.g. cash/bank transfer etc)

   2. Adjust their account balance manually to reflect that the refund was given

   3. Mark the refund record as manual processed (click the Mark as Manually Processed link)