How do I refund the charge for the invoice that was deleted accidentally?

Problem Statement

You want to know how do I refund the charge for the invoice that was deleted accidentally.

Solution

Scope

How do I refund the charge for a deleted invoice?

Summary

Once the invoice is deleted, you can either process a refund from the Transaction page directly or Import the deleted invoice using API/Bulk Operation and process a refund.

Solution

By default, you would not be able to delete a Paid invoice. In order to do that, you would have deleted the 'Payments' attached to the invoice. Once you have deleted the payments, the charge will be moved to the 'Excess Payments', and this will be visible under the Customer details page.

Follow the below steps to process a refund for Online and Offline payments.

There are two types of invoices.

1. Current term

2. Past term

Current term:

If it's deleting a current term invoice, you will have an option to 'Regenerate invoice'. Please refer to this link Regenerate Invoice for more details. Once you regenerate the invoice, the excess payments will be applied automatically. Then you can refund the invoice using the refund option.

Please refer to the video link for reference.

Past term:

There are three ways to process a refund for Past terms:

1. From transaction page

2. Import an invoice using API

3. Import invoice using Bulk Operation

Note: You can process the refund directly from the transaction without creating an invoice. The only difference is refunding from the transaction will not create a refunded credit note but a transaction reference ID will be created. If you prefer to have a credit note as a reference, you need to import an invoice via API/Bulk Operation

1. From the transaction page:

Navigate to the Subscription details page > Activity log and look for the payment deleted log (right below the invoice deleted log) and click on Show More. Now, you need to click on the transaction hyperlink highlighted in blue in color.

You will be redirected to the transaction page. Here, you will find the option to refund.

Note: For online payments, you will get an option to process online refund i.e, Refund and offline refund i.e, Record Refund and for offline payments, you will only have Record Refund.

Once you process a refund, you will see a reference ID for the refund.

2. Via Import an invoice API or Bulk Operation:

You need to import an invoice using API/bulk operation, collect payment for it and then process the refund. In order to restore the deleted invoice, you can achieve this using Import an invoice API or Bulk Operation.

To retrieve the deleted invoice you need the logs of the invoice that was deleted and use the same data to Import an invoice via API. Refer to the article How to restore the deleted invoice?