Refunding a Client — Full & Partial Refunds

Shoots get cancelled, listings fall through, and sometimes the right move is to give money back. Refunds in Spatiko happen on the order — you pick the payment, enter the amount, and everything downstream updates: the payment status, the balance, and the paper trail. No switching to the Stripe dashboard to make it right.

Where you issue a refund

Open the order and follow the Payment history link on the billing card — the same place you see every payment on the order. Each refundable payment carries a refund action. Choosing it opens a short form:

• Amount — anything up to what’s still refundable on that payment, with a one-click shortcut to refund the full amount.
• Reason — optional, kept with the refund for your records.

Refunds follow your team’s roles and permissions: anyone allowed to manage invoices can issue one.

For a payment that came through online checkout, the money goes back to the payment method the client used — how quickly it shows on their statement is up to their bank. For a payment you recorded manually — cash, check, transfer — the refund is the bookkeeping side: Spatiko records it instantly and updates the order, and you return the money the way it came in.

Full or partial

You choose the amount, not just “refund everything.” Refund a disputed line item, keep a cancellation fee, or return the difference after a pricing correction. Spatiko caps each refund at what’s still refundable on that payment, so you can never return more than was actually paid — and money you’ve already handed back through a credit note can’t be refunded a second time. You can come back and refund more later if it comes to that.

Refund or credit note?

A plain refund and a credit note end the same way — money back — but suit different moments:

• Refund from payment history when you’re thinking in payments: “return $125 of that card charge.” Quick, order-side, done. Where the payment settled an invoice, the credit-note paperwork over the returned money is generated for you, so the invoice’s story stays complete.
• Issue a credit note when you’re thinking in documents: crediting specific invoice lines with their share of discount and tax, holding the amount as account credit for a future order instead of sending it back, or writing off a balance that’s never coming. Its Refund settlement moves the money too.

Either path keeps refunds and paperwork consistent — you can’t end up with money returned and no record, or a record and no money.

If the payment carried a tip, refunds come out of the order portion first. A refund for the shoot leaves the tip with the photographer; only a refund larger than the order portion starts eating into it.

What a refund changes

• The payment is marked refunded, or partially refunded if some of it stands.
• The order recalculates immediately — its payment status moves to refunded or partially refunded, and the amount-paid and balance figures follow. See how invoices work for how statuses roll up.
• The activity feed logs the refund with its amount and reason, so the order tells the whole story later.

Refunds never re-lock downloads

If the order uses pay-to-download and the client already unlocked their media, a refund does not claw it back — the downloads stay open. The gate only re-locks when a genuine new balance appears, such as adding billable services to an already-paid order. Refunding after delivery is a customer-service decision, not a media-access one.

Refunding while cancelling an order

If the refund is part of calling off the shoot, you don’t need two steps. The cancel-order dialog asks whether to process a refund and for how much, so cancelling the order and returning the money happen together. Keeping part of the payment as a cancellation fee is just a partial refund — the retained amount is itemized on the cancelled order.

Refunds issued in Stripe

If you (or someone on your team) refund a charge from the Stripe dashboard instead, Spatiko finds out: Stripe notifies it of the refund, Spatiko records it against the payment, and the order’s status and balance update just as if the refund had been issued in-app. Nothing falls out of sync — though issuing from Spatiko keeps the reason and the actor on the record.

For the wider picture of how money moves through a shoot, start with getting paid.

Go deeper

• Credit notes and write-offs — the document side of money going back, account credit, and bad debt.
• How orders work — where a cancelled order sits among the stages, and what happens to its sessions.
• How clients pay and cancel a booking — how an agent settles a balance, and what they can cancel themselves when you allow it.
• When clients pay — payment timing — how account credit is applied at booking and returned if you refund later.
• Roles and permissions in depth — decide who on your team can issue a refund.
• Recording cash, check and other manual payments — the offline payments a refund may need to reverse.