Handle a chargeback or payment dispute

A chargeback feels personal, but it’s usually just a process. When a client’s card payment gets disputed, Fee-Lion already holds the trail you need to respond calmly: the estimate they approved, the portal they approved it in, and the invoice they paid. Here’s what’s happening and how to push back with evidence you didn’t have to dig for.

What a chargeback actually is

When your client paid by card, that money flowed through Stripe Connect straight into your own Stripe account. A chargeback (also called a dispute) happens when the cardholder asks their bank to reverse that charge — maybe they don’t recognize the descriptor, forgot they hired you, or are genuinely unhappy. The bank pulls the funds back while it investigates, so the payment temporarily comes out of your balance.

• The disputed amount is held until the dispute resolves, and there’s a separate bank-set dispute fee.
• You get a window to submit evidence. Banks decide in your favor far more often when the paper trail is clean.
• This is the card network’s process, run through Stripe — Fee-Lion’s job is to show you the invoice it touches and hand you the approval history to fight it.

Where it shows up in Fee-Lion

Open the affected invoice from Invoices in the left sidebar. An invoice that was paid and then disputed no longer reads as cleanly settled — its status reflects that the funds were reversed, so it won’t sit quietly as Paid in your aging.

1. Go to Invoices and open the invoice tied to the disputed charge (search by number in the list, or use the ⌘K command palette: type “INV-204”).
2. Check the payment line on the invoice to confirm the amount and the date the card was originally run.
3. Cross-reference your Stripe dashboard, where the dispute itself lives, including the deadline to respond.

Tip: The actual dispute form and evidence upload happen in your own Stripe dashboard — that’s where the money is and where the bank reads your response. Fee-Lion is your source for the matching invoice, estimate, and approval timeline to attach.

Gather the evidence you already have

This is where Fee-Lion earns its keep. Because every job starts as an estimate the client approves in a no-login magic-link portal, you have a documented “yes” before any money changed hands.

• The approved estimate — the line items, scope, and total your client signed off on. Open it from Estimates and export it to PDF for upload to Stripe.
• The portal approval — proof the client opened the link and approved. This shows the charge wasn’t a surprise.
• The invoice — the converted invoice with its line items and the card payment record, also exportable as a PDF.
• Any project discussion — if you used Projects and exchanged client discussions, that thread shows delivered, accepted work.

Bundle those into your Stripe dispute response. A clear story — “client approved this estimate, it became this invoice, here’s the paid work” — is exactly what banks look for.

After it resolves

If you win, the held funds return to your Stripe balance and you can leave the invoice as settled. If you lose, the money stays reversed and the invoice should reflect that it’s unpaid again — at that point you can decide whether to re-send a payment reminder, record an offline payment if they make you whole another way, or write it off. Either way, keep your future self covered: always run jobs through an approved estimate first, so the next dispute is just as easy to answer.

What’s next

• Connect Stripe to get paid
• Issue a refund
• Record an offline payment
• How a client approves an estimate