What a card refund costs your property

When someone pays by credit card, the card processor takes a processing fee out of that payment. If you later refund that payment, the processor does not give the fee back. The resident gets every dollar they paid, and your property is left short by the fee.

This is true whether or not you pass processing fees on to residents. If you pass the fee on, the resident paid it, and refunding the payment returns it to them while the processor still keeps its own cut. If you absorb the fee yourself, you paid it once at the time of the payment and you do not get it back at the refund. Either way, the cost lands on the property.

A real example

A resident pays 525.00 by card. The processor takes 15.53 in fees, so the property receives 509.47. The payment is later refunded in full. The resident is made whole at 525.00. The 15.53 is not returned. The property is out 15.53 on a transaction that, from the resident's point of view, never happened.

Residents cannot refund themselves

Only your property can start a refund. Residents have no way to reverse their own payment, ask the system for their money back, or trigger anything automatic. Every refund is chosen, entered and approved by your staff, which means every one of these fees is a cost your property decided to take on. Nobody can cause one without you.

Where you will see this

In your payment settings. Under the credit card payment setting you will find a standing note about this, visible whether card payments are turned on or off, so nobody turns them on without knowing what a refund will cost.

At the moment you refund. When you reverse a card payment that carried a processing fee passed on to the resident, the refund window now shows you the full picture before you confirm: the full card payment, the processing fee, anything already refunded, the refund you are entering now, and the net result for your property. The figures update as you change the amount, so a partial refund shows you its own cost rather than a general warning.

If the processor has not yet reported its exact fee for that payment, the window shows an estimate worked out from your property's configured card fee rate and says clearly that it is an estimate. If your property has no card fee configured at all, no figures are shown, because a made-up number is worse than none. The note still tells you the fee is lost.

Refunding as account credit costs nothing

Putting the money on the resident's account as credit does not reverse the card charge, so no processing fee is lost. The money stays with the property and is applied to a future charge. That is why the cost breakdown appears only when you are actually sending money back to a card.

Card payments start off when accounting is switched on

When accounting is switched on for a property, that property now starts with credit card payments turned off. Accepting cards becomes a deliberate choice someone makes knowing what a refund costs, rather than a setting nobody looked at. Turning card payments on is a single toggle in your billing settings whenever you want them.

Properties already using accounting keep their current setting and are not affected.

Good to know

• This applies only to card payments. Cash, cheque and bank payments have no processing fee to lose.
• The breakdown is there to inform your decision. It does not change the refund itself, the amount the resident receives, or anything posted to your general ledger.
• If you pass processing fees on to residents, a partial refund returns a proportional share of the surcharge, and the breakdown accounts for that.