Any deductions made to a payout you receive (not including transaction fees), are the result of rebalancing a negative amount on your GoCardless account. These deductions are classed as debits within the GoCardless system and occur as a result of three different events.
- Late failures
- Customer chargebacks (claims)
- Client refunds
Late failures
Payments collected via GoCardless are marked as successful or failed one business day after the charge date, following our receipt of reports from clients’ banks advising us of all the failed payments from the previous day’s collections. All payments not included in those reports are considered successful.
On occasion, a bank will fail to include an unsuccessful payment in their following day’s report. When this happens the payment will be marked as successful, despite the funds not actually having been received. Usually, the bank will recognise their error and include the failure in the next day’s report, at which point its status will update in GoCardless.
On rare occasion, the client’s bank won’t report the failure until after the funds have been paid out to you. To balance the overpayment against your account, the amount previously paid out to you in error will be deducted from your subsequent collected payments, before any further payouts are processed to you. This deduction will be listed as a debit in the report of the payout it was settled against.
Please note : Payments collected from clients in the Eurozone (via the SEPA bank debit scheme) are more frequently reported as failures several days after the charge date. As such, we recommend allowing 7 business days before processing a refund of the collected payment to the client. |
Customer chargebacks (claims)
A chargeback (or ‘claim’) is the term used to describe an instance where a client has disputed a payment collected from their bank account directly with their bank, and subsequently had those funds reimbursed to them.
For payments collected through GoCardless, after the client’s bank has returned the funds to the client, GoCardless will be informed of the details of the disputed payment and the funds are automatically recovered by the bank. Following this, the negative balance will be attributed to your account and the funds deducted from your subsequent collected payments, before any further payouts are processed to you. This deduction will be listed as a debit in the report of the payout it was settled against.
Please see here for more information on chargebacks →
Client refunds
Client refunds are actioned at the discretion of the GoCardless Credit team, following receipt of a request from the business that collected the payment. The request must include the unique payment ID (only visible to the business) of the payment requesting to be refunded as a security measure. Full and partial refunds can be processed.
In almost all cases, payments will only be refunded if the business wishing to return the funds has a collected balance in their account that is awaiting payout and covers the amount of the refund in full.
As with all other payout deductions, refunded payments are added as debits against the payout they are settled against.
Please see here for more information on the refund request process →