Refunding Client Payments

Learn about refunding client payments from within Ignition.

Nick Dainty avatar
Written by Nick Dainty
Updated this week

It's possible to request a refund for a client payment within Ignition. However, every refund request is reviewed by our team as this is a high-risk function for both Ignition and your business.

Note that your clients can still dispute (chargeback) payments even after they are refunded through Ignition. To limit this risk to your business and ours, not all refund requests can be approved. Ignition also reserves the right to refuse to process a refund of any value based on a risk assessment of your business and history.

Requesting a refund for a payment made by your client through Ignition

We are unable to refund payments on these conditions:

  • Partial amount in the invoice

  • Collected Invoices that are more than 60-90 days old (depending on the financial institution)

  • No sufficient balance to allow the funds to be reversed (deducted) from your account, before refunding to your client's account.

  • When requesting a refund over 1,500 Ignition will carry out some additional checks, which could result in approval taking slightly longer

While we highly recommend that refunds should be processed within Ignition, if your refund matches any of above points you will be unable to use the refund function and will need to return funds outside of Ignition.

How to request a refund

As an Administrator user on the Ignition account, to request a refund on a client payment:

In the Clients tab select the client.

Navigate to the Invoices tab in their client file find the impacted transaction

[Note: The payment collection must be completed]

Click the invoice to view the invoice details click Request refund

Review the details select a Reason for the refund → click Submit.

Please note: Your request may not be processed if the payment was collected more than 60 or 90 days ago (depending on your client's financial institution).

This request will be sent to our team for review and an email will be sent to you to confirm the refund request has been submitted.

Timeline for processing the refund

Please ensure that you inform your client of the expected timeframe, to avoid them lodging a dispute while Ignition is ongoing with the refund process.

Reversal

Once a refund is approved to proceed, Ignition will:

  1. Reverse the amount (clawback the disbursed payment) from your disbursal account

    • If the payment has been successfully collected from your client, but not yet paid out (disbursed) to you, the system will proceed in refunding the client.

  2. The system will refund the amount to your client's payment method in the invoice.

When the invoice is already collected, the whole refund process will take about 7-14 banking days.

Your client's experience

Once the refund is processed and approved, the default contact on the client file will receive an email to notify them that their refund is on its way.

Your experience as the Advisor

Once you've submitted a refund request, you will receive an email to confirm the refund is currently being reviewed.

Once reviewed, you will receive an email notification with the decision.

Additionally, the refund request activity will display in under the invoice in the Invoice tab and in the Activity section of the invoice.

Clawback

Please note that when we are processing refunds, the system may offset this with any incoming or in-transit disbursals.

For example, if you submitted a refund request for $500 but you have an incoming disbursal of $200, the system will remove your disbursal and then deduct the difference ($300) from your account.

Possible Refund errors

If we are unable to reverse funds from your account, we will be unable to complete a refund, and we will notify you of possible issues such as:

  • No sufficient balance to allow for the funds to be reversed (deducted) to your account first before refunding to your client's account. 

  • Collected Invoices that are more than 60-90 days old (depending on the financial institution)

Partial Refunds

At the current moment, we are unable to process "partial" refunds - refunds of only part of an amount paid by your client.

If a refund is processed by us we will refund the total amount paid by that client in that transaction. If you require a partial refund please perform this external to Ignition by bank transfer to your client.

Charges for Refunds

We do not charge any additional fees to process a refund. The customer will receive the full amount of the payment back into their bank account.

Ignition Payment Fees (Transaction fees/Merchant Fees)

We do not and cannot refund the original transaction fee for the successful collection from the customer.

Surcharging Fees

If a refund is issued for a payment with a surcharging fee, the surcharging fee will be returned to the client as part of the refund.

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