Reversal
A reversal is a record of what money flowing back out of a previously resolved settlement means to the ledger: for example a chargeback on a card payment, an indemnity claim against a Direct Debit collection, a refund an admin sent from inside the app, or a syndicate-side write-off.
A reversal is not the money itself. Money moving at the payment provider is a separate refund record; the reversal is the ledger’s answer to it. The two are kept apart because a refund made in the provider’s own dashboard arrives knowing nothing about which charges it covered, and cannot be written as a reversal until an admin says.
Reversals are first-class records: each one carries its own cause (card chargeback, admin refund, syndicate write-off, and so on), source (payer bank, admin, provider, or syndicate), and dispute status (received → disputed → final: lost / final: won). The cause is a label on the record rather than a promise about the payment method — a dispute reported by the payment provider currently arrives labelled as a card chargeback whatever the money was taken by. See Reversals.
A reversal also decides what happens to the transactions resolved by the original settlement:
- Rebill: the transactions revert to unpaid, and the next billing cycle picks them up again. This is the default for payer-bank reversals like a DD failure or a card chargeback.
- Forgive: the transactions stay marked resolved; the syndicate carries the loss. Used for goodwill refunds, write-offs, and corrections.
Correcting a charge downwards is the case that catches people out. The charges stay settled at the corrected figure and only the difference goes back, and a credit for the difference is posted either way — that credit is the ledger saying what the syndicate charged. What differs is what pays it. Where the difference is refunded to the member’s bank, the credit is discharged in the same moment by the money going back, so the member’s balance does not move. Where there was no provider money to refund, the credit is left standing, and it is how the member is made whole. See Reversals for the full rule.
The reversal record on this page is distinct from the Reversal transaction type described in Transaction types. The transaction type is a manual ledger correction (an admin cancelling a wrong shortfall, say); the reversal record on this page applies to in-app payment-provider settlements where money has actually come back through the bank or provider.