Use Case: Refund a Collected Fee
You can refund a fee mistakenly charged to a Merchant or when client satisfaction hinges upon the reimbursement of a fee or set of fees. When this happens, it’s critical to understand how to issue a fee refund quickly and correctly to provide the best client experience to your Merchants. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to refund a fee to a Merchant that was previously collected.
![image-20240124-161353.png](../__attachments/23618651888/image-20240124-161353.png?inst-v=0ddc2d53-a548-4624-9646-d52b510a0ee7)
Partial view of the Transaction Details page where individual fee line items can be refunded.
Objective
Refund a Fee to a Merchant that has already been processed and collected.
Audience
Facilitators
Referrers
Environment
Portal (Sandbox)
Portal (Production)
Prerequisites
Prerequisites:
You must have a fully boarded Payrix account to perform any of the actions described in the use case guides.
Make sure you’re familiar with the following terms and information:
Fee Types - The different categories of fees that can be created and charged.
Fee Structure - Overview of the basic layout for a Fee configuration.
Fee Schedules - Available time or event-based triggers used to initiate a Fee charge.
Fee Rules - Options to further refine the criteria of the Fee Schedule.
Fee Modifiers - Options to redirect the Fee collection flow and who will pay the Fee.
Fee Collection Process - Overview of how Fee payments are collected and where they can be found.
Warnings
Warnings will provide insight or advice to avoid issues related to risk, visibility, and overall performance of the product during this use case.
Warning: This process is only applicable to Merchants on Net Billing. Merchants under Statement Billing cannot use this process.
Warning: This process only applies to fees (fee entries) that have been fully processed and settled. Pending fee charges must be fully processed before a refund can be issued.
Warning: Fees charges that are Refunded from a Referrer to a Merchant are immediately debited from the Referrer’s Available Balance and credited to the Merchant’s Available Balance.
Warning: Ensure your account has sufficient funds to issue the refund. Fee Refunds can trigger a negative balance which can cause additional platform fees and negative disbursements (or “debits”) to be assessed to your business account to cover the negative balance (depending on your Facilitator’s grace period).
Tips
Tips will provide suggestions to streamline or better prepare you to apply this use case tutorial.
Tip: When refunding the Fee, always locate the “opposing entry”, the negative amount debited from the Merchant, to ensure the fee amount you’re refunding is correct and the initial charge is aligned with the reason for the refund.
Additional Resources
For more information about fees and your account, see the Fee Management page.
Refunding a Fee
Issue a Fee Refund from the Transaction Details page
Issue a Fee Refund from the Balance Details page
Issue a Fee Refund from the Merchant Profile page
Result: The refunded fee charge is immediately debited to the Merchant’s available balance from your available balance. The Entry Details page for the fee charge will display as “Refunded” with a status badge next to the Entity Details page title to confirm the refund was issued.
Conclusion
Once you’ve completed your Merchant’s fee refund, you can verify the completion of the refund processing by accessing your Balance Details page and reviewing your Entries section. Verify processing completion on the Balance Details page using the following criteria to validate:
References
Click the links or items below to access any of the following pages:
Payment History page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Transaction Details page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Merchant Profile page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Fees menu [Referrer][Facilitator]
Balance Details page [Referrer][Facilitator]
Entry Details page [Referrer][Facilitator]