I’m really confused how marking a payment as refunded works and this is potentially a bug.
Here’s an example of a partial refund:
Create an invoice for $100.
Create a payment for $100.
Refund $50 of that payment. It says partially refunded.
The invoices shows Total is $100, paid to date is $50 and balance due is $0. If you were to look at this invoice, it makes no sense because nothing on the invoice indicates that a payment was refunded. It’s simply showing that the invoice is for $100, the client paid $50 and nothing else is owing.
If you do a full refund, the same thing happens. Invoice says $100, paid to date $0 (because it was refunded in full) and balance due $0. So you end up with an invoice for $100 that has no due balance but nothing is displayed on the invoice to show the refund took place?
Refunds will reverse any payments applied and also reduce the paid to dates. There was a regression recently which wasn’t handling this if the invoice was archived, this has since been resolved.
Is there a way to show the refund took place on the invoice? As it looks, if a refund is issued and either the customer or myself looks at that invoice at a later date, it’s not obvious what happened because there is nothing to indicate the refund took place but also it shows that only $50 was paid when the invoice is for $100.
Any updates here? Refunds are not intuitive. I’m cleaning up our past due invoices and there are many cases where an invoice has been totally paid, we went back and processed a refund for something, and now that invoice is marked as ‘Past Due’. This makes it very tricky to figure out what’s what. Please advise.
@david After the partial refund, if the invoice is shown as partial with a balance due of the refunded amount now, would you just archive it? Is there a way to display the partially refunded amount on the invoice?
Normally clients want something on the invoice to say that it was partially refunded.
Agree. This seems like an oversight on the invoice since it’s supposed to be an indicator of payments and refunds to a customer for a particular invoice (also, the “receipt” per se). I was trying to figure this out and this thread was an eye opener for me. Having “refunds” off on their own loses the context of that transaction.
You are able to customise your invoice template to show payment and refund history with variables, which is how I have handled it as David suggested above.
