When money comes back after it was paid

Occasionally a payment goes out, arrives, and then comes back. The bank
recalls it, the receiving bank returns it because the account was dormant
or closed, or a cheque is charged back after it cleared.

This page explains what LEAT does then, and what it does not do.

The original payment stays on the record

It happened. The money left LEAT's account, the bank reported that it
reached you, and both of those remain true afterwards.

So LEAT does not delete the settlement or edit it. It records a second,
later fact beside it: the money came back, on this date, for this reason.
Anybody looking at the payment sees both, in order.

The alternative would be a record in which the payment never succeeded,
and then nobody can explain the debit that is still sitting on the bank
statement.

What you are still owed does not change

A reversal is about where the money is. It is not a decision that you are
no longer owed anything.

So every reversal opens a question with somebody's name on it: what is
owed now, why did the account reject it, and does a new payment need to be
prepared. That question is closed by a person writing down what happened,
never by a timer and never by the system deciding on its own.

If some of it came back and some did not

LEAT will not record that as a reversal.

A partial return is its own thing with its own accounting treatment, and
calling the whole payment reversed would quietly change the amount on a
payment that was already approved and signed for. It is raised as a
question for a person instead.

What we need before we can record one

A reversal changes what LEAT tells a donor about whether you were paid, so
it is not something anybody can type in on a hunch.

• A reference to the bank's own record of the return, on a feed we have declared.
• The reason, in words.
• The accounting treatment Finance has approved for it.

Without all three, LEAT refuses to record it.