Refunds and disputes

Two very different things happen when a client wants their money back. In the first, they tell you. In the second, they tell their bank.

The first is a refund and you're in control of it. The second is a dispute, it runs on somebody else's clock, and the money leaves before anyone decides who was right.

Refunding a card sale

The mechanics belong to the sale — picking line items or a flat amount, what comes back into stock, what happens to sessions and commission. That's all in Refunds and voids.

What belongs here is the money, and one fact that surprises people:

A refund does not go back to the card. The destinations are Cash and the client's account balance, and the original charge stays where it is.

So a card sale being refunded means you either hand over cash or credit the client's account for next time. That's worth knowing before you promise a client anything at the desk, and worth telling them plainly — "I can put it straight on your account, or I can give you it in cash" is a much better sentence than discovering the constraint halfway through.

Account balance needs a client on the sale, so it's unavailable on a walk-in. And a refund can't be undone, which is why the confirmation restates what's about to happen before you press it.

When a client goes to their bank

A dispute — a chargeback — is a client asking their card issuer to reverse a payment. The bank takes the money back straight away and then asks you whether it should. You get a deadline, and it isn't generous.

RewireBox finds out through Stripe and raises a task for it as soon as it does, titled with the amount so it can't be mistaken for routine work. That task is the alarm; the response itself happens in Stripe, because that's where evidence is uploaded and where the issuer is listening.

The task points at the sale it came from, and — this is the part worth remembering — at what the client agreed to. A no-show fee is the payment most likely to be disputed here, for an obvious reason: the client received no service, which is precisely what the bank hears first.

Winning a fee dispute

It's more winnable than it looks, and it turns entirely on evidence that already exists if you set things up properly:

• The policy they accepted, with its exact wording, the time they accepted it and where from. This is stored with the appointment.
• The reminders you sent, which are on the client's record.
• The absence of a cancellation — nothing was received before the appointment.

Together those say: they were told, they agreed, they were reminded, and they didn't tell us. That's a case. Without a recorded agreement, it usually isn't one — which is the real argument for asking for the card and the agreement at booking rather than the day before.