Requesting and Approving Refunds

Refunds are self-serve, but gated behind a liability acknowledgment — the owner has to explicitly accept a versioned liability note before anyone at the school can request one, since a refund moves real money back out.

How old a payment can be

Paystack only refunds payments made within the last year. After that, Fees101 won't offer a Paystack refund. Send the money by bank transfer from the school, and record the refund with that method.

Before you use this

Recording payments by hand takes you back towards your old way of working. Nothing from Paystack or Monnify confirms the payment, so the amount is only as reliable as the person who typed it, and you are responsible for it. Invoices, balances, debtors lists and reports all use what was entered, so a mistake or a false entry affects all of them.

Where you can, ask parents to pay by transfer into their child's account number, or on your card terminal. Those payments are confirmed by your provider and record themselves, with no typing. Keep manual payments for money that truly came in another way, keep the approval step in place, and check your cash against your entries.

The liability gate

Nobody can request a refund until the owner has accepted the current version of the liability note. If that note is ever updated, the owner needs to accept the new version again before refunds can resume.

Requesting a refund

Go to Money → Refunds.

Select the auto-collected payment to refund.

Choose a category: overpayment, withdrawal, duplicate payment, fee correction, parent request, or other.

Enter a reason — minimum 20 characters.

Choose a method: it must match the original payment's provider, or bank_transfer (which requires a reference at least 3 characters long as proof).

Submit.

Refunding more than the original payment amount is blocked outright — an over-refund can't be submitted.

Approval

If the owner submits the request, it auto-applies immediately. If anyone else submits it, it waits for a different staff member who holds Approve Refunds to approve it — the requester and approver can't be the same person.

Confirming an externally-initiated refund

If a refund or chargeback was initiated on the provider's side and your webhook only detected it after the fact, this same page lets you confirm and reconcile that record rather than only handling refunds you initiated yourself.

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