Chargeback
A chargeback is a forced reversal of a card payment, initiated by the buyer's bank rather than the merchant — the money is pulled back, often with a fee.
A chargeback is a card payment reversed at the cardholder’s request through their bank — not a refund you chose to give, but a claw-back the bank imposes, usually taking the original amount plus a fee out of your account.
How it works
- A cardholder disputes a charge with their bank — fraud, goods not received, or “I didn’t authorise this”.
- The bank provisionally reverses the payment and debits the merchant.
- The merchant can contest it with evidence, but the money is gone in the meantime.
Unlike a refund, a chargeback happens to you, on the bank’s timeline, and it lands in your accounts as an unexpected debit that has to be reconciled against a sale you thought was settled.
Why it matters
Chargebacks hit twice: you lose the revenue and you often lose the goods or service too, plus the fee. Left untracked, they quietly erode margins and turn up as an unmatched transaction that doesn’t tie to anything. For a platform settling funds to sellers, an unaccounted-for chargeback can mean you’ve paid out money that later got reversed — a real hole, not just a bookkeeping one.
How Fynex does it
Fynex reconciles reversals the way it reconciles payments: a chargeback posts back to the books as a journal entry against the original sale, with a confidence signal, so the hit is visible immediately rather than surfacing at bank reconciliation. See reconciliation.