Refunds

What is a Refund?

A refund is the outcome of transferring the full or partial amount of a payment back to the payer.

A refund is always associated to the original payment. A payment may have multiple refunds - for instance, multiple partial refunds, or a series of failed refunds - but the total amount of successful refunds may never exceed the total amount of a payment.

Refund information

Refunds are exposed as part of the payment they relate to and are currently not directly accessible.

Like payments, refunds have a status and a fine-grained reason.

Status	Reason	Description
pending	new	The refund has been created but not yet sent to the payment provider
	pending	The request has been forwarded to the payment provider, we are waiting for an answer
	unknown	The request has been forwarded to the payment provider but there's been an unexpected error, we don't know if the refund succeeded or not
succeeded	succeeded	The refund was successful
withheld	withheld	The refund cannot currently be done due to insufficient funds
failed	error	There was a clear error, the refund didn't go through

Refund flows

Refunds are initiated by the customer through the refunds API.

For payment providers for which RaiseNow is acting as a payment facilitator, the customer must have enough funds available, otherwise the refund goes in status withheld. The system will check again every hour for up to two weeks, after which the refund will fail. This is currently the case for TWINT.

In other cases, for instance Stripe, the refund request is sent directly to the payment provider. Depending on the payment method, the refund can be almost immediate (e.g. for card payments) or can take several days (e.g. with SEPA Direct Debit).

For some payment methods, like Direct Debit variants over direct bank integration, refunds are not possible.