Most Common Support Issues
Refunding a Customer
Every now and then you need to refund money to a customer. Whether it be because you over-collected from them or because you agreed to a credit/refund.
There are two parts to this process – paying the money to the customer and accounting for the refund. While uCollect doesn’t manage the refund process (we only deal with collecting funds), here are some suggestions.
Refunding Money to a Customer
Your gateway may have options to refund or reverse a transaction. You probably need to know whether it is a complete refund of a collection transaction recently processed, a partial amount of a recent collection, or something else.
- Most credit card merchant accounts will have a portal/console where you can refund/reverse a recent charged
- If the payment was originally collected by Stripe you can actually process a refund directly from your Stripe dashboard – just find the payment (search using the transaction ID from the collection history screen (starts with “ch_”) and you can issue a complete or partial refund
- Forte allow you to reverse a transaction – in their console click transactions/search, find the one you want, at the bottom are some buttons – one says Reverse
- Alternatively, you could use Stripe’s Pay Out feature or Forte’s Add transaction screen (trans type = Refund/Credit) to make a direct credit payment to your customer.
Accounting for the Refund
The above suggestions will move the funds, but not record it in Xero/Quickbooks. In Xero/Quickbooks you can do either:
- Create a Spend Money for the refund (won’t show on the customer receivable statement)
- Create a Sales Credit Note to reverse the original sale/invoice and then use the “Make a Cash Refund” section at the bottom of the approved Credit Note to record the refund.