A Refund Has Not Arrived: What You Can Check
When a customer tells you a refund hasn't arrived, it usually comes down to one of three things. The refund may never have been processed, it could have been processed and still be making its way through the banks, or it may have gone somewhere the customer isn't currently checking. Only the first of these needs fixing on your end, so it's worth working out which one you're dealing with before making any promises.
Everything you need is on the order itself. You'll find this in Past Orders, at the bottom of the Dines app, or on the left-hand side if you're using it in a browser.
On this page
About the five-to-seven day figure
When you refund a payment on the till, it will ask you to confirm, and it gives you a line to pass on to the customer: that card refunds usually take five to seven working days. This is the wording we ask you to use.
It's best to treat this as guidance rather than a firm promise. Dines doesn't track or enforce that window once a refund has left us, since the timing from that point is really down to the customer's bank and the card networks. Unfortunately, there isn't much either of us can do to speed things up from there.
Please feel free to pass this figure on if it's helpful, but try to avoid committing to a specific date, or offering a different number of your own. If a customer is past that window and starting to worry, it's usually more reassuring to check what's actually happened than to offer another estimate.
Confirm the refund actually went through
A good first step is to open the order and have a look at the payment. A full refund that's gone through will mark the payment as refunded, showing an amount and a date against it.
A partial refund is a little quieter. It records an amount and a date, but won't mark the whole payment as refunded unless it happens to bring the balance down to nothing. It's worth checking the amount and date rather than relying on the marker alone, otherwise you might mistake a genuine partial refund for nothing having happened at all.
This is a good place to start, since a refund that was attempted and then refused won't leave any more of a trace than one that was never attempted in the first place.
When a refund won't go through
If a refund was attempted but didn't go through, it's usually down to one of two reasons. Thankfully, neither of these fails silently, so you should always get a message explaining what's happened.
The first is that the funds were never actually captured. You might see a message about that specifically, or a more general refund failure. Either way, it means the payment was authorised but never actually taken, so there's nothing to send back. This is worth knowing, because the payment can still look completely normal elsewhere: a charge that was authorised but never taken can still sit in your Transactions tab (inside Past Orders) marked as Completed. Unfortunately there's no way to refund it in this case, since there's no money on it to return.
The second reason is redeemables. If the bill used a discount code or a prepaid tab, refunding individual items on that bill won't be possible.
When the customer's looking in the wrong place
A refund always goes back to the card that was used to pay, which matters more than it might sound. If a customer paid using a phone wallet, a shared account, or a work card, the card that paid may not be the account they're currently checking.
It's worth asking which card they used to pay, rather than which account they're looking at, as the two aren't always the same.
Still nothing?
If you've checked everything above and still can't find an answer, please contact us with the order. What happens to a refund after it leaves Dines is really down to the banks, so having the order in front of us is the most useful starting point.
If you have any questions or feedback, or a Knowledge Base article you would like to see, please get in touch.
