Refunding an invoice

A paid invoice can be refunded from the invoice page. Admins only, and always the full amount.

How it works depends on how you were paid

Paid by card through Stripe. Billow tells Stripe to refund the card. The invoice stays Paid until Stripe confirms, then flips to Refunded on its own. Refunding from your Stripe dashboard instead works the same way.

Paid by bank transfer, or marked paid by hand. The invoice flips to Refunded immediately after you confirm. Moving the actual money is up to you, since Billow never held it.

Refunded is final

There’s no way back to Paid. If the client pays again, that’s a new invoice.

Refunded invoices drop out of your revenue figures, so your dashboard reflects what you actually kept.

What refunding a deposit does

Refunding a deposit invoice releases the project’s deposit slot, so you can draft a fresh deposit invoice for it. Useful when a deposit was wrong and needs redoing.

Deleting refunded invoices

Same rule as paid ones: anything paid through Stripe can never be deleted, refunded or not. There’s a real payment on record.

Manually-refunded invoices can be deleted by an admin.

What your client gets

Nothing from Billow. Stripe emails its own refund receipt for card payments if you have that enabled. For a bank transfer, tell them yourself.

Partial refunds can only be issued from your Stripe dashboard, but we don't encourage doing that at the moment. The invoice stays Paid and Billow records the partial refund in its activity feed. Billow never starts a partial refund itself.