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 deposit refund rules live on Settings → Payments & deposits → Deposits, in the Customer deposits card (deposits are Available on Plus plan and above; only Owners and Admins see this page). The same policy also governs pay-in-full bookings — one cancellation policy for all booking payments; on a paid-in-full booking the dialogs and emails say "payment" instead of "deposit".

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%).
• For full or partial, set the Cancellation deadline in hours before the booking (1–168; the default is 24). Cancel before the deadline → refunded per the policy; cancel after it → no refund. The deadline 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".

What customers experience

When a customer cancels online in time, the refund is issued automatically per your policy. If their cancellation would lose some or all of the deposit, they must first explicitly confirm the exact amount they'd lose — nothing is taken silently. Separately, your booking Cancellation deadline in Booking rules can block online cancellation entirely close to the booking (customers are asked to phone you instead).

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?).

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)? · How far ahead (and how late) can customers book?