When a donor pays the same pledge twice online
What the books show when a donor pays one pledge invoice twice through a payment gateway, and how to refund the extra or keep it with consent.
By Achekam · · 5 min read · For Non-profit businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
A corporate sponsor commits to a pledge, you send the invoice with a pay link, and their finance officer pays it. Then a colleague working from an older e-mail pays it again. Or a supporter's card payment seems to hang on the checkout page, they press the button a second time, and both attempts succeed. One pledge, two payments.
For a non-profit this is more delicate than it is for a shop. The money came from someone who chose to support your work. How quickly and openly you deal with their slip tells them how you will treat the rest of their giving. Holding on to the extra without a word, or taking a month to sort it out, can quietly cost you a supporter.
Here is what Achekam records when an online pledge payment arrives twice, where the surplus sits, and how to send it back or, only with the donor's clear agreement, keep it.
A repeated notification is not a second payment
Gateways tell your books about a payment by sending a notification, and they sometimes send the same one more than once, for instance when they do not get a reply quickly. That is a technical echo, not money.
Achekam treats it that way. A gateway payment is verified before it is recorded, then entered as a receipt against the invoice: the gateway's clearing account is debited, trade receivables are credited, and the invoice shows as paid or part-paid. The amount is checked against what the pay link asked for, and a repeated notification never pays the invoice twice.
So when a donor writes to say "I think I paid you twice", start in the gateway's own dashboard, not the ledger. Look for two separate transactions with two references. Check whether both settled, or whether the second attempt was declined, abandoned or reversed. A failed second attempt needs nothing more than a friendly reply confirming that only one payment went through.
Where a genuine second payment sits
If both transactions settled, the second one is real money and must be accounted for.
Achekam records customer payments against one invoice or spread across a customer's invoices. A part payment leaves the invoice part-paid, and when a receipt is more than the invoice still owes, the extra is held on the customer's account. In a non-profit's books the customer is the donor or sponsor, so the surplus becomes a credit in their name.
That is the right resting place while you decide what happens next. The extra is not donation income, because the donor never meant to give it. It is not yet a refund either, because nothing has gone back. It is money you are holding for someone else, and a credit on their account makes it visible to anyone who opens their record.
Two other tools help here:
- Re-allocation. A receipt can be re-allocated. If the donor has another pledge instalment open and agrees, the credit can settle that instead of travelling back and forth.
- Credit notes. Sometimes the duplication starts on your side: the same pledge was invoiced twice and the donor paid both. Then the fix is a credit note, issued from the duplicate invoice it corrects, in full or for chosen lines. Any leftover credit is held for the donor. A credit note always comes from an invoice; there is no free-standing one.
Refunding through the gateway, then recording it
Achekam does not send refunds of online invoice payments through the gateway. The refund is made in the gateway's own dashboard by someone with access to it, and a person then records it in Achekam.
That split means two people, or at least two steps, must agree. A simple sequence:
- Find the second transaction in the gateway dashboard and note its reference.
- Refund it there, in full, to the card or account it came from.
- Save the gateway's refund confirmation with the donor's correspondence.
- Ask an administrator to record the refund in Achekam against the donor's credit. Administrators can refund or reverse a receipt.
- When the gateway next settles to your bank, check that the clearing account still makes sense after the refund.
Gateways differ in timing and in what they keep. If you use Stripe, its guide to refunding and cancelling payments explains the difference between cancelling and refunding, full and partial refunds, how long a refund takes to reach the customer and which fees are not returned. Most other gateways publish similar pages in their own documentation.
If a fee on the refunded payment is not returned to you, treat it as your organisation's cost. Deducting it from the donor's refund, for a mistake that was nobody's fault, is a poor trade for a small saving.
Keeping the money only when the donor says so in writing
Some donors reply, "Don't worry, keep it." That is generous, and you may accept, but only on clear terms.
Ask them to confirm in writing, an e-mail is enough, that they intend the second payment as a gift, and which fund, programme or appeal it should support. A cheerful "no problem" on the phone is not the same thing, and an auditor or funder looking at an unexplained surplus will want to see the donor's words.
Once you have that confirmation, record it properly rather than leaving the credit to sit. One clean route is to raise a new invoice for the additional gift, which takes the next number in your sequence and posts to the ledger, and then re-allocate the held receipt to it. The books then show a second pledge, paid, with the donor's e-mail filed beside it.
If you issue donation receipts or tax certificates, ask your accountant whether the second gift needs its own.
Telling the donor what happened
Whatever the outcome, write to the donor promptly. Keep it short and specific:
- What you found: two payments for one pledge, with the dates.
- What you did: refunded the second through the gateway, or, at their request, recorded it as a further gift to a named fund.
- When to expect the money back, if it is a refund, and that timing depends on their bank or card issuer.
- A named person to contact if anything looks wrong.
Thank them as well. They tried to support you, and the message should feel like stewardship, not admin.
Before the next pledge goes out
Decide now who looks after duplicate payments, who has refund rights in the gateway dashboard and who records refunds in the books. If you are still choosing a gateway, setting up your payment gateway covers the connection itself. And before invoicing more pledges, settle whether automatic overdue reminders should reach your donors at all.
A donor who sees their mistake handled quickly and honestly is more likely to give again, not less.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
