If you need to record a refund to a patient, you'll be able to do this quite easily! There are two main ways to record a refund: you can record the issuing of money back to the patient (so, you're giving them cash back, or sending funds back to their credit card), or you can convert their payment into account credit (meaning, no money is actually given back to them, but they can use what has already been paid towards the purchase of a future service or product).

In this guide, we'll go through how refunds in Cliniko work, and we'll point you to some more in-depth articles for each scenario. Check out the video below for an overview on how refunding works:

And, for a written guide, read on below!

Typically, the payment process is going to be pretty straightforward: you'll raise an invoice for your patient, enter the payment, and it's all done. Easy!

There might be occasions where you need to refund a customer, though. When this happens, there will be a couple things you can do:

On any invoice, you'll see a button at the top that says Reverse:

When pressing that, a new page will appear. It will look similar to an invoice, but at the top, it will say New credit note:

When pressing that, it will show you a new area that says Credit note items, and it will reverse every item on the invoice by applying a negative quantity, and therefore a negative total:

You can certainly amend what's being listed as negative—if you're only refunding part of the invoice, for example, you can adjust the quantity or the unit price, which will in turn adjust the total amount.

You'll also see that there are two buttons at the bottom of the page, called Create credit & refund and Create credit. Let's go through what each of those buttons does.

If you want to refund money back to a patient, you'll want to press the Create credit & refund button:

This will bring you to a page that looks very similar to the payment page, except you'll see that the top of the page says New refund:

Within that page, you'll also see that there is a negative balance in the refund source section, and a refund summary that shows how much is remaining to refund.

At the bottom, you'll be able to save the refund:

That will then bring you to a new page that indicates a new credit note, and let you know which invoice it's related to:

At the bottom, you'll see how much was refunded, and what payment method it was refunded to (i.e. credit card, cash, etc.).

If you'd like to see a more in-depth guide on how to record a refund, head over here.

If you don't want to refund a patient, but would rather convert what they have paid to account credit, you'll want to press the button that says, simply, Create credit:

That button automatically reverses the invoice and creates an account credit, indicated as a credit balance:

At the bottom, you'll see that this credit note has been allocated to account credit—and that's it! You don't need to do anything else to create that account credit—you can simply use it to pay for any other invoices that may be raised for this patient.

You'll notice that both credit notes and refunds are recorded in the invoices and payments lists:

This will help you to keep track what has been refunded, and what has been applied as account credit. Refunds will also be recorded in your payments reports—head over here to learn more.

While the above is an overview, you can find detailed guides on all compontents of the refund/credit process here:

If you have any questions about refunding your patients or converting their payments to account credit, our support team will be happy to help!