There are a few possible reasons for this:

• Their bank has not returned their funds to them yet. See When will my customer receive their refunded money? below.
• You may have cancelled the booking but not refunded it. To make sure the payment has been refunded, open the customer’s booking overview and click on the booking total to view the payment history.
• Their bank may not show them the charge or the refund if the original charge and the refund happened around the same time. Or, it might be displayed on a customer’s bank statement as one net charge instead of two separate transactions.
• In rare cases, the debit from your bank account to fund the refund may have failed. See Where does the money for a refund come from? below.

FareHarbor uses the same refund process as any major retailer. When a refund is issued, the money is transferred to the customer’s bank, who then determines when the credit will be applied back to the customer’s card. The amount of time it takes for your customer to see the refund on their card depends on their bank, as well as how the refund was issued.

• Refunds from your FareHarbor Future Payouts balance or Refund Reserve are processed right away. In these cases, it will usually take customers 3 to 5 business days to see the refunded amount on their card.
• Refunds funded from your bank account (available for US banks only) typically take 6 to 10 business days to appear on the customer’s card.
• In rare cases, it can take up to 30 business days for a refunded amount to appear.

Everything in your FareHarbor Dashboard is displayed real-time with the status from our payment processor, Stripe. If you see on the Dashboard that the refund has been processed successfully, that means it is now in the bank’s hands to deliver to the customer.

Whenever the amount paid on a booking is less than the booking total, you’ll see an amount due.

This applies to refunded bookings as well. If a full refund was issued, the amount paid will become $0. Because the booking total hasn’t changed, there will now be an amount due on the booking.

If you want to mark a refunded booking as “Paid in full,” you can do so by adding a line item discount on the booking for the amount due.

This will adjust the booking total to $0, and mark the booking as “Paid in full.”

See: Checking the status of credit card refunds

No – refunds for any credit card payments made outside of FareHarbor (for example, payments made before your company started using FareHarbor) will have to be handled manually.

However, you can still document these refunds using custom refunds. Learn more about custom refunds.

Yes – you can create both full and partial refunds in FareHarbor.

For partial refunds, FareHarbor will refund a portion of the credit card processing fee based on the amount being refunded. The credit card processing fee is returned based on a prorated scale, so if there is a 50% refund given, 50% of the processing fee will be returned to you, the business owner.

Learn how to issue a partial refund.

Yes, you can offer a gift card instead of a refund in the Dashboard. Learn how to offer credit.

Full refunds are free in FareHarbor. Any fees associated with the payment will be returned back to both you and the customer.

For partial refunds, FareHarbor will refund a portion of the credit card processing fee based on the amount being refunded.

At FareHarbor, we have a policy of retaining a booking fee on bookings with partial refunds. This fee is intended to cover the costs associated with processing and managing bookings, regardless of the refund amount.

By default, credit card refunds will be issued using money you already have in FareHarbor. Funds will first be taken from your “Future Payouts” balance, then taken from your refund reserve if needed.

In the event that there is not enough money in these accounts, the funds will be taken from your bank account.

Refunds from your bank account

Your bank account is only used if there’s not enough money already in FareHarbor to cover the refund. In this case, your bank account will be debited for the full amount of the refund.

The reason for debiting the full amount from the bank is to avoid potential discrepancies with your FareHarbor accounts. It normally takes 4 to 5 business days before the money from the bank is available to be refunded. If the debit was used along with funds from, say, your “Future Payouts” balance, those funds may have been paid out or used for another refund by the time the debit transfer is successful.

When you initiate a refund that requires a bank debit, you’ll see a message alerting you that your bank account will be automatically debited for the amount of the refund. After you click “Refund selected payments,” the activity at the bottom of the booking will show the status of the bank debit for that particular refund:

Note: Bank account debits for refunds will show on your bank statement as “FAREHARBOR.”

Keeping track of your money in FareHarbor

You can track how much money you have in FareHarbor, as well as your bank debits, by navigating to Reports > Payouts & Refunds, then to the Refunds & Bank Debits tab.

The refund reserve allows you to hold some money in FareHarbor to use for refunds without creating a bank debit. This is optional, but it has some important benefits:

• When you use money from your refund reserve for a refund, it is processed instantly. Bank debits take 4-5 business days to clear before the refund is processed. Although you can still send a formal refund email to a customer with the bank debit method, if they are watching their statement they may get anxious and start a dispute with their credit card company.
• You can fund your refund reserve by saving money from your “Future Payouts” account or by adding money from your bank account. Bank debits remove money from your bank account every time you issue a refund and don’t have enough money already in FareHarbor.

See Managing your refund reserve for a step-by-step guide on how to update your refund reserve.

The refund process in FareHarbor remains the same, even if there has been a change in the customer’s card. Once you’ve successfully issued a refund, the customer’s card issuer will route the refund to the correct account.

To check if your refund went through successfully in FareHarbor, open the customer’s booking overview and locate the payment summary (the section with the booking total). When you click on this section, you will see a payment history appear below it. If the charge has been marked as refunded, the refund was successful.

For full refunds, all fees (credit card processing fee + booking fee) are refunded to the client and customer.

For partial refunds, FareHarbor keeps the booking fee and refunds part of the credit card processing fee based on the CC rate and the amount being refunded. Since credit card processing fees are a percentage rate plus a set amount, in general, partial refunds use the following formula to determine the amount of CC processing fee to be refunded:

(CC fee % rate)(refund amount) + (CC fee set amount)(refund % out of original charge)

Example with US credit card processing fee

Using the US credit card processing fee (1.9% + 30c) as an example, the 30c is prorated and added to 1.9% of the refund amount, which is then added to the original refund amount to determine the total refund amount.

• Original charge = $100
• Original CC processing fee = $2.20 ($1.90 + 30c)
• Refund amount = $50

• CC processing fee refund = $1.10 (95c + 15c)

  • 95c is 1.9% of the refund amount ($50)
  • 15c is the prorated amount (for a 50% refund, we then take 50% of 30c)

Another example:

• Original charge = $917.36
• Original CC processing fee = $17.73 ($17.43 + 30c)
• Refund amount = $64

• CC processing fee refund = $1.24 ($1.22 + 2c)

  • $1.22 is 1.9% of the refund amount ($64)
  • 2c is the prorated amount (for a 7% refund, we then take 7% of 30c)

If a customer makes a booking using a credit card from another country “currency conversion rate risk” may occur.

What this means: If a customer pays $100 for a tour, but gets refunded, if the card they used to pay is an out of U.S. account the customer may receive more or less than the originally charged amount to their account even if a full refund is given.

Verbiage from Stripe that we can send to a customer:

If a currency-converted payment is disputed or refunded, the amount you received is converted back to the presentment currency at the current rate. This fluctuates on a daily basis, so the rate used when a charge is converted often differs from the rate used when a dispute or refund occurs. The returned amount can be less—or more—than what the payment provided. Ultimately, a customer is always refunded the exact amount they paid and in the currency they paid in, regardless of the rate and cost to the Stripe user.

If you have any questions, Slack #payment_operations!

These settings are located under Settings > Bank & Payments > Edit, and can only be edited by FH Admins.

• Allow bank debit refunds (previously called “linked refunds”) is what enables FareHarbor to trigger bank debits for refunds. If a company has this option disabled, they’ll receive an error when they try to issue a refund that requires a bank debit. If you want to limit which users can trigger bank debits for refunds, you may want to set this at the permission level instead (Permission group > Bookings & Payments > Advanced > “Automatically debit money from bank account to cover refunds”).

• Allow legacy refunds (previously “allow unlinked refunds”) should only be checked if the company needs to refund legacy charges.

  What is a legacy charge? A legacy charge is any credit card payment that was charged prior to this transition. On June 11, 2015, FareHarbor changed its payment processing service from Balanced Payments to Stripe.

• If you are trying to help an end customer locate their refund, you can provide them with the Acquire Reference Number, which comes from Stripe.

• There is nothing we can do in FareHarbor or Stripe to cancel a refund once it has been initiated. If the money for the refund came from a bank debit, the client can try to call their bank (but the bank may not always be able to cancel). If the money for the refund came from the client’s Future Payouts account in FareHarbor, then the refund cannot be cancelled.

• If a refund has failed or has been cancelled, the FareHarbor Payment Operations team will reach out directly to the client.

• Payoneer accounts: The admin notes here explain how to check if a company is using Payoneer, along with tips on how they can ensure they have enough money for refunds.

• If a client just wants to know where their customer’s refund is, here’s some additional language you can use:

  FareHarbor uses the same refund process as any major retailer. When a refund is issued through FareHarbor, the money is transferred to your customer’s bank, who then determines when the credit will be applied back to the customer’s card. The amount of time it takes for your customer to see the refund on their card depends on their bank, as well as how the refund was issued.

  We’ve seen funds return to the customer’s account in 1 or 2 business days, but it can take up to 30 business days in some rare cases. (This is why we add standard language about it taking up to 30 days, but you can expect in the majority of cases it will be faster.)

  The money to cover a refund can come from one of two places: money you already have in FareHarbor in your Future Payouts and Refund Reserve accounts, or a debit to your bank account. Your bank account is only used if there’s not enough already in FareHarbor to cover the refund. You can tell if a refund required a bank debit by looking for the “Debit timeline” in the booking’s activity log. Here’s some more information on how to check the status of a credit card refund.

  Refunds from your Future Payouts or Refund Reserve accounts happen instantly in the FareHarbor Dashboard, and typically take 3-5 business days to appear in the customer’s account. Refunds from your bank account take a bit longer; we usually tell customers 6-10 business days for those.