Refunds and Disputes

The Refund Register is every refund you have issued, with the fee split and the reasons behind each one. It also holds the queue of refund requests your donors have submitted themselves.

When you’d use this

• A donor was charged twice and wants one of the gifts back.
• A donor has requested a refund through your portal and you need to approve or decline it.
• Your finance team asks what refunds actually cost the organization this quarter.
• You refunded a donation and need to know what happens to the tax receipt the donor already has.
• A chargeback came in and you need to know what it did to the gift and the receipt.

Where it lives

Sidebar → Smart Payments → Refunds. You need permission to view disputes and refunds to read it, and permission to approve them to decide a request.

Issuing a refund

Refunds are issued from the transaction, not from this register. Open Smart Payments → Transactions, find the payment, and use its refund action.

1. Leave the amount blank to refund the full remaining balance, or enter a smaller figure for a partial refund. The form tells you the maximum that can still be refunded.
2. Pick the Category: Duplicate payment, Payer request, Error, Fraud, or Chargeback.
3. Write the Reason (shared with the payer). This is required and the payer reads it.
4. Add an Internal note (staff only) if your team needs context.
5. Submit.

Partial refunds add up: the total ever refunded cannot exceed the original charge. Some providers do not support partial refunds at all, and the form says so before you try, offering the full remaining amount instead.

Issuing a refund needs permission to approve disputes and refunds, and is rate limited to protect against mistakes at volume.

Large refunds may need a second signature. If your organization has set an approval threshold and there are at least two eligible approvers, the refund is held rather than sent, and nothing leaves the account until a second person approves it.

Reading the register

The Refunds issued tab opens on a seeded date range.

Four cards: Refunds issued, Total refunded, Fees returned (split between the provider’s fee and the platform fee), and Refund rate against the number of succeeded transactions.

Where the money went is the card that matters for your books: a refund’s headline amount is not the organization’s cost. Only the fee the provider and platform give back reduces it. It splits the figure into Returned to payers, Provider fee returned and Platform fee returned. A zero in a fee line means your organization absorbed that fee.

By reason groups refunds by the reason you shared with the payer, with counts, amounts and shares.

Every refund lists them all: Date, Amount, Status, Payer, Reason, Internal note, and who issued it. Click a row for the detail panel, which adds who initiated it and when, when it completed, the fees reversed, and the transaction it reverses.

Completed is the field to read when a donor says the money has not arrived. Until it is set, the refund is still with the provider and the money has not left the account. A refund can sit there for days.

Donor refund requests

The Donor requests tab is the queue of requests donors submitted themselves. It opens showing only open requests; press Show all requests to see every one.

Status	What it means
Awaiting review	Submitted, nobody has picked it up.
Under review	Claimed by a staff member, or held for a second approval.
Approved: refund issued	Decided and sent to the provider.
Refunded	The money is back with the payer.
Declined	Decided against, with a reason the payer reads.
Withdrawn by payer	The donor withdrew it.

To decide a request:

1. Press the claim action on a request that is awaiting review, so your colleagues know you have it.
2. Read the original gift, the amount requested, and the payer’s reason.
3. To approve, confirm in Approve this refund request? The dialog states the amount, the payer’s email, and that the refund goes to the provider immediately and cannot be recalled. Add an optional Note to the payer.
4. To decline, open Decline this refund request? and type a Reason for declining. This is required, and the donor is emailed what you write.

A request badged awaiting second approval is held on one signature. Nothing has gone to the provider.

If you filed the request yourself, Muin either asks you to record a note alongside your approval or blocks the self-approval outright, depending on how your organization has set its approval posture.

What a refund does to a gift

• The money goes back to the payer through the provider, and a refund row is recorded in your ledger.
• The transaction becomes refunded or partially refunded.
• For a donation, the fund, campaign and accounting allocations are reversed, and the contribution’s own status follows.
• The tax receipt is voided on a full refund and amended on a partial one. A donor’s giving history and annual statement move with it.

What a dispute does

A dispute, also called a chargeback, is the payer’s bank reversing the charge rather than you refunding it.

• A lost dispute reverses the gift without a second call to the provider. The bank has already taken the money, so refunding again would pay twice. The bookkeeping is the same as a refund: allocations reversed, a ledger row written, and the receipt voided or amended.
• If a receipt had already gone out, Muin raises an alert telling you exactly what was reversed.
• A new dispute raises an event, an inbox task and a notification, so it does not sit unnoticed.
• The dispute workspace itself is a separate screen, Smart Payments → Disputes, open to owners and admins, where you upload evidence or accept the dispute.

When it goes wrong

“Refund of X exceeds the remaining refundable balance of Y.” Someone has already refunded part of this charge. Refund the remaining balance instead.

“This charge has no remaining refundable balance.” It is fully refunded already. Check the register.

“{provider} does not support partial refunds. Refund the full remaining balance of … instead.” Your provider is all-or-nothing on this charge.

“Transaction has no payment provider reference for refund.” The payment was recorded in Muin but never charged through a provider, so there is nothing to reverse. Reverse it on your books instead.

The transaction cannot be refunded at all. Only succeeded and partially refunded payments can be refunded. A pending or failed payment has taken no money.

“Unknown refund-request status.” The status filter in the URL is not one Muin knows. Reload the page without the filter.

“No refunds in this window.” Nothing was refunded in the selected range. Widen the range to see earlier refunds.

“Could not load the refund report.” Reload. An empty register after this message is not proof of no refunds.

You cannot press Approve or Decline. The tooltip says which permission you are missing: refund-approval access to approve or decline, and refund access to claim.

Next step

For the payout a refund is netted out of, see Payouts. For the transaction list you issue refunds from, see Managing Transactions.