Cancelled Payments versus Refunded Payments

The difference between cancelled and refunded payments is all in the timing!

Autobooks payment tools give you the power to cancel your customer payments or refund them if needed. This article will point out when one is an option versus the other.

Key Definitions

First, let's look at some key definitions that will be important to our topic:

• Cancelled payments - these are payments that have not yet begun processing and are simply "stopped" before they travel further to your business account.
• Refunded payments - these are payments that have begun processing (they may or may not have landed into your business account) and are returned or "reversed" back through the payment processing path to the customer (or customer's bank/card issuer).

Cancel vs Refund 

Whether you are able to cancel a payment before its processed or if you must refund the payment all comes down to if the customer payment has begun processing.

Autobooks gathers up all payments triggered on a given day and processes them in a group (also known as a batch) around 6pm ET each day.

Cancelling a payment

You are usually able to cancel a customer payment if the customer's payment method was used on that same day prior to our batch processing time (NOTE: the exact batch time can vary slightly. If a payment occurs AFTER batch time, it will be processed the next business day).

For example: if your customer has sent in a payment to you via your payment link today at 10am ET, you'll be able to cancel that payment until it is batched later in the day.

When a payment is cancelled, processing has not occurred. You will not be assessed a transaction fee from Autobooks for a cancelled payment, as we have not incurred a cost to manage this payment.

Refunding a payment

If your customer's payment has been sent for processing and you need to return those funds to the customer, you'll need to refund the payment.

When a payment is refunded, processing has occurred. The payment may or may not have yet landed into your bank account, but the funds are en route. Because payment processing has begun, you will still be assessed the transaction processing fee for that payment. Autobooks does not charge an additional return fee to your account.

What about Chargebacks?

A chargeback is like a refund but the process is triggered by your customer contacting their bank or card issuer and disputing the payment they made to your business. 

To learn more about Autobooks' chargeback process, check out our article here.