Payment Reversals
Contents
What are Payment Reversals?
A payment reversal is when a transaction paid to you is returned to the buyer. This typically happens after a chargeback or having lost a dispute with a customer (i.e. a lost PayPal claim).
In this situation, it is common to want to reverse the actions that a transaction triggered when it was originally received. This is what the Payment Reversals feature in WHMCS can automate for you.
What does it do?
For supported gateways, WHMCS can automatically reverse a payment when a notification is received from a payment gateway about a reversal:
Supported reversal actions include:
- Change Invoice Status - Set Invoice to Collections Status. The collections status for invoices in WHMCS is used to denote an invoice which is a bad debt and can be used to track invoices which have received chargebacks or been reversed as a result of a lost dispute.
- Change Due Dates - Reverts Next Due Date Increments for the products and services contained within an invoice. This has the effect of making the item be considered due again, and in cases where the date is in the past, overdue, which will trigger an automated suspension until repayment is made.
Enabling Automated Payment Reversals
To enable Automated Payment Reversal handling, navigate to Setup > Automation Settings and ensure the checkboxes are ticked for the Change Invoice Status and Change Due Dates settings.
Email Notifications
When a payment reversal notification is received, WHMCS will send an email notification to all admin users with a role group that is set to receive "Account Emails". See Managing Administrator Roles for more information.
Making a Manual Payment Reversal
A manual payment reversal can be performed when adding a refund to an invoice.
Simply check the Reverse Payment when making the refund and the invoice status and next due dates will be reversed as appropriate.
Reversal Actions for Given Items
The reversal actions performed can vary depending upon the products/services contained with an invoice as follows.
- Hosting & Hosting Addons Invoice
- Any hosting and hosting addons that are part of the invoice for the reversed transaction will have their next due dates automatically reverted.
- If the payment reversal occurs as part of the cron, automatic suspend, if enabled, will occur next.
- If the reversal is standalone, any potential suspend will run when the automatic suspension tasks is next scheduled.
- Domain Items
- Domain items will need to be manually managed. There is no automatic action taken with domains when a Payment Reversal occurs.
- Upgrade Invoice
- The service associated with the upgrade will be immediately suspended.
- Add Funds Invoice
- The credit applied to the client account will be immediately removed. This could leave a client with a negative credit balance.
- Mass Payment Invoice
- Each invoice that has been paid will have a reversed transaction applied to it and the invoice will be set to Collections.
- ProRated Hosting & Hosting Addons
- The next due date of the items on the invoice will be set to the previous due date.
- If the payment reversal occurs as part of the cron, automatic suspend, if enabled, may occur next.
- If the reversal is standalone, any potential suspend will run when the automatic suspension tasks is next scheduled.
- Custom Items
- Nothing can occur with custom invoice items. There is no relationship in WHMCS that can be utilised.