When do customers get their deposit back?

Set your deposit cancellation policy — no refunds, full or partial — with a deadline, and see how staff and customer cancellations apply it.

Your refund rules live on Settings → Payments and deposits → What guests pay, in the Cancellations and refunds section (deposits are Available on Plus plan and above; only Owners and Admins can open the page). One cancellation policy covers every payment taken at booking — deposits, pay-in-full payments, priced pre-orders and paid extras; on a paid-in-full booking the dialogs and emails say "payment" instead of "deposit". The one exception: when a party paying in full per person gets smaller, the difference is always refunded, whatever the policy. The section starts with what happens when a customer cancels, in three steps — until when they can cancel or change online, what they get back, and what happens after that.

Setting the policy

• Choose a Cancellation policy:
• No refunds — deposits are non-refundable.
• Full refund — full refund if cancelled before the deadline.
• Partial refund — a configurable percentage refunded if cancelled before the deadline.
• For a partial policy, set the Refund percentage (1–99%) — the same figure appears in your customers' terms and emails.
• For full or partial, set the Refund cut-off in hours before the booking (0–168; the default is 24; 0 means refunds right up to the booking time). Cancel before the cut-off → refunded per the policy; cancel after it → no refund. The cut-off counts back from the booking time on your venue's clock — "24 hours before" always means the same time on the clock the day before, so on the two nights a year the clocks change the window is an hour shorter or longer in real terms.
• Click Save changes. Saving also updates your public customer cancellation policy — you'll see "Saved — this also updated your customer cancellation policy".

A special date's own cut-off. A date can have a refund cut-off of its own — its Money back if they cancel, on Settings → Bookings → Special dates (for example 72 hours before on Christmas Day). Bookings made for that date are refunded under the date's own cut-off, and their terms say so; everything else about your policy (full, partial or none) stays the same.

When a customer cancels a booking that had a deposit

Whatever your policy says, nothing is taken silently: a customer cancelling online is always shown what happens to their deposit before the cancellation goes through. If they cancel in time, the refund is issued automatically per the policy you set in Cancellations and refunds (full, partial or none — see above). If their cancellation would lose some or all of the deposit, they must first explicitly confirm the exact amount they'd lose. Separately, your Cancellation deadline (Settings → Bookings → When people can book → Cancelling and changing online) can block online cancelling close to the booking (customers are asked to contact you instead), and nobody can cancel online once their booking time has passed. If online cancelling closes before refunds stop (a cancellation deadline longer than your refund cut-off), a customer still due a refund would have to contact you to cancel — both pages say so in one sentence and offer to line the two up.

Where your venue offers the My account page (Pro and above, or with the Loyalty product), customers can also see where their money stands themselves: their booking card in My account shows the deposit paid and any refund — "£10.00 of £20.00 refunded", or "Refunded in full" — so "did my refund go through?" calls often answer themselves (see What can customers do in the customer portal?).

Moved bookings and booking emails

If a paid booking is moved, the refund cut-off counts back from whichever is earlier — the booking time that was paid for or the new time — so a move can never stretch the deadline (moving a booking later leaves it where it was; moving it earlier brings it forward). The Refund cut-off row on What guests pay says so, and so do the booking terms and emails. Confirmation and reminder emails only promise a free cancellation when cancelling then really refunds in full — under No refunds they say the deposit is non-refundable, under Partial refund they give the percentage and the date it applies until, and once the cut-off has passed they say it is no longer refundable. A booking keeps the refund terms it was made under.

When staff cancel a booking with a deposit

Cancelling a deposit-paid booking opens a choice:

• Cancel & Issue Refund — refunds whatever your policy allows right now (any amount already refunded earlier is counted, so nothing is ever refunded twice).
• Cancel & Retain Deposit — cancels and keeps the deposit.
• Refund deposit anyway — shown instead when the policy would refund £0 (no-refund policy, or past the deadline); it cancels and refunds the rest of the deposit in full as a goodwill override.

Any path that moves money asks you to confirm your password, or approve with a manager's PIN where offered. If you decline a pending booking request, its deposit is always refunded in full automatically — the customer did nothing wrong.

Refunding without cancelling

You can also refund part or all of a booking's payment without cancelling it — for a goodwill gesture, a change of plan, or a booking that was cancelled earlier with the deposit retained. Open the booking, and in its payment section click Refund…: enter either a Fixed amount (£) (the full remaining amount is pre-filled — you can't refund more than what's left) or a Percentage (%) of what's still refundable (worked out on what's left, rounded down to the penny — 50% twice refunds half, then half of the rest), then confirm with your password or a manager's PIN. Only the money moves — the booking itself keeps its status. Anything already refunded on the booking is counted, so repeated refunds can never exceed what the customer paid. The refund goes back to how the customer paid — their card, and their gift card where one part-paid — and they receive a confirmation email. On a pay-in-full booking the payment (including any paid extras or pre-order) refunds as one pot. Paid extras can also be refunded line by line — the Extras card's Refund extras… returns exactly what the customer paid for the picked items (where they paid for more than one of something, you pick how many — one of two, say) and marks them Refunded, with part-refunded lines carrying a "1 of 2 refunded" note (see How do I sell extras with bookings?) — and a paid pre-order the same way, dish by dish and quantity by quantity, with Refund dishes… under its dish lines (see How do pre-orders work for large bookings?). The button appears for anyone with the refund permission (Owners and Admins by default); event tickets are refunded from the event's ticket holders instead, where the event's own refund policy applies.

One thing to know for your bookkeeping: Stripe does not return its own card-processing fees when a payment is refunded. Those fees are charged by Stripe under your Stripe agreement and are paid to Stripe directly — ResoFlow never receives or holds any part of them.

Related: How do I take booking deposits? · How do I cancel a booking (and what happens to the deposit)? · When can customers book? · What can customers pay when they book?