What Is a Chargeback? How Card Disputes Work | Cash Book

A chargeback is the reversal of a card payment, carried out by your card issuer through the card scheme rather than by the merchant. You raise it with your bank, not with the shop. If it succeeds, the money is taken back whether the merchant agrees or not.

Four parties and a reversal

Card networks sit between four parties: you, your issuer, the merchant and the merchant's acquirer. A chargeback runs along that chain backwards.

You contact your issuer and describe what went wrong. The issuer maps the complaint to a reason code, which is the scheme's taxonomy of things that can go wrong: goods not received, goods not as described, a duplicate charge, a subscription still billing after cancellation, and so on down a long list that the issuer knows well and you have never seen. The code matters. It sets both the evidence required and the time limit that applies, so the wrong one loses the claim on process rather than on merits.

Then the amount is debited from the acquirer, which passes it to the merchant with a fee attached, and the merchant can defend it with proof of delivery, the terms you accepted, or logs showing the service was used. If the issuer is not satisfied the case escalates, and in some schemes it reaches arbitration. Changing your mind is not a reason code. It never has been.

Three things it is not

It is not a refund. A refund is the merchant giving your money back through the same card, voluntarily, usually within days; a chargeback is imposed on them, and it costs them a fee even when they win, which is why every consumer regulator including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau tells you to contact the seller first. Most cases end there. Do it in writing and keep the reply. A merchant who said no in an email is useful to you later.

It is not a SEPA direct debit return. Direct debits are not card payments. Under the SEPA Direct Debit Core scheme you can ask for a refund within eight weeks of an authorised collection with no reason given, and up to 13 months where there was no valid mandate. The SEPA entry sets out both windows.

It is not the only route in the UK. Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 makes a credit card provider jointly and severally liable with the retailer where something goes wrong with a purchase costing more than £100 and no more than £30,000. A statutory right, not a scheme rule. It can apply where only part of the payment went on the card, a deposit for instance, and it is not bound by the 120-day window, because the right you have follows the agreement rather than the plastic.

Disputes are won on records kept beforehand

The claims that fail are rarely the unreasonable ones. They are the ones where the claimant cannot say what was charged, on what date, on which card, or what they asked the merchant for and when.

A log holding the merchant, the amount, the date and a note gives you half of that. The confirmation email and the messages with the seller are the other half. Photograph the receipt at the till rather than hoping to find it in a coat pocket in March; the guide to scanning receipts into an expense tracker covers making that automatic.

One pattern deserves naming on its own. The subscription you cancelled that kept billing is among the most common dispute categories and the most avoidable of all of them, because the charge sat on your own statement every month for however long it ran before anybody called it a dispute. Reversing a charge does not end the agreement either, so cancel the thing as well, as the direct debit versus standing order entry explains. The guide to tracking subscriptions and recurring bills covers building the list, and the subscription cost calculator turns it into an annual figure.

What the app can hold

Cash Book never connects to a bank, so a disputed charge does not arrive or disappear on its own. The value is the record you already kept.

Receipt scanning reads a photographed bill or a screenshot into transactions, so evidence and log entry happen in the same second. Search and history filter by period and by text, which is how you find the date and amount of a charge from four months ago without scrolling a statement, and tags and categories keep recurring charges together, so the one that should have stopped shows up as a line that kept appearing.

When the money comes back, log the credit as income or delete the original entry, whichever keeps the month honest, so insights reflects what happened rather than what was charged. None of this is legal advice. For a specific dispute, your issuer's complaints process and then the national ombudsman or regulator are the right route.

The clock you are on

Time limits kill most claims. The window usually closes while somebody is still deciding whether it is worth the bother.

The common scheme figure is around 120 days, but the start moves with the reason code: sometimes the transaction date, sometimes the date delivery was expected. In the United States, billing-error rules give you 60 days from the statement on which the charge appeared, a different and shorter clock running alongside it. Section 75 outlasts both. SEPA runs on its own eight weeks and 13 months and has nothing to do with any of this.

Assume the shortest one applies, and ask your issuer today which it is.

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