Payments

Record what has arrived against a booking — a bank transfer, a card payment, cash, a cheque — with the date it landed and the payer’s own reference off your statement. What is still owed is then the agreed total minus what has come in, and it is shown on the booking.

Payments are never edited or deleted. If one is wrong, Reverse records the opposite entry beside it, so the mistake and the correction both stay visible. A ledger somebody can quietly tidy up is not a ledger, and the one time it matters is the one time you need to prove what happened. A refund is recorded the same way — as a negative amount.

Point a refund at the request the money came in against. The Against box on the payment form lists everything a payment could belong to, not only what is still owed — so a deposit you have been paid in full is still there to refund part of, and so is a request you withdrew after the group had already paid it. Each one says what is true of it: still due, already paid, or withdrawn with money on it.

Payments taken online reverse themselves the same way. If a group’s bank charges one back, or you refund one, a matching negative entry appears against the booking and what they owe goes back up. The original stays, because the money did arrive on that day and your bank statement will say so. We email you when that happens — one message however many came back, to whoever can see money — so a booking does not quietly go back into debt without anybody noticing.

By card, it’s within moments. A refund you make in your Stripe account counts, in full or in part, and so does a chargeback, recorded when Stripe actually takes the money rather than when a payer first queries it. If you win the dispute, the money goes back on the booking. Stripe charges its own fee for each dispute, from your Stripe account; it isn’t put on the booking. Direct Debit reversals are picked up once a day.

If somebody pays too much, the booking says overpaid, and by how much, rather than rounding it away to “settled”. And a booking with no agreed total shows what has been paid but does not guess at a balance, because there is nothing yet to measure it against.