If you've been collecting payments for any length of time across African markets, you already know this scenario well. A customer initiates a transfer for ₦5,000. By the time it lands in your account, it's ₦4,500; the mobile network deducted a fee the customer didn't account for. Or it's ₦5,500 because they misread the invoice amount and sent more than required.

Either way, the payment is wrong. And until now, fixing it was entirely your problem.

You'd notice the discrepancy, locate the customer's details, manually initiate a refund, wait for it to process, and move on, only to do the same thing again for the next one. For businesses processing high transaction volumes, this isn't an occasional inconvenience. It's a recurring operational drain that pulls your team away from work that actually matters.

We built Auto Refund for Payment discrepancies to remove that process entirely. Enable it once from your dashboard settings, and every payment discrepancy, including underpayment or overpayment, is automatically refunded to the customer the moment the system detects it. 

This feature is built for any Startbutton merchant who regularly experiences payment discrepancies due to mobile money transfer fees, customer input errors, or bank charges, including:

• High-volume merchants processing large numbers of collections daily where manual discrepancy review is a high operational cost

• SaaS platforms where failed or incorrect payments disrupt subscription workflows

• E-commerce and marketplace operators where a clean, fast refund experience directly affects customer trust and repeat purchase behavior

• Finance teams managing reconciliation across multiple currencies and markets who need clean, matched records without manual exceptions

• Any business that currently handles underpayments and overpayments by manually initiating individual refunds

How it works

Once you enable Auto Refund for Payment discrepancies in your dashboard settings, the system monitors every incoming collection against its expected amount.

When a payment arrives with any discrepancy, the system handles it automatically without any action required from your team.

Here's exactly what happens:

You initiate a collection for ₦5,000.

The customer sends ₦4,500 (underpayment) or ₦5,500 (overpayment).

As soon as the system receives the payment, it detects the discrepancy. A refund is automatically initiated to the customer for the full discrepant amount. Both the collection record and the refund record appear on your merchant dashboard. A webhook notification is delivered to your system for the refund.

The customer gets their money back quickly, and your records are clean. 

How to enable it

Step 1: Log in to your Startbutton dashboard

Sign in with your account details, then navigate to your main dashboard.

Step 2: Go to Dashboard Settings

From your settings panel, find the “Additional settings” tab. 

Step 3: Toggle the feature on

Scroll down to configure the Auto Refund for Payment discrepancies.

any collection received with an amount that differs from the expected initiated amount will automatically trigger a refund to the customer.

Step 4: Disable it anytime if needed

If your operational requirements change, you can return to the same settings panel and disable the feature at any time. You remain in control of whether the automation is active.

What you will see on your dashboard

When Auto Refund is enabled and a discrepancy triggers the flow, your dashboard gives you full visibility into both sides of the transaction.

You'll see a collection record showing the payment received, including the amount, currency, date, and transaction status.

You'll also see a refund record showing the automatic refund initiated,  linked to the original collection, with its own status and timestamp.

Both records appear in your transaction history and are exportable through the standard transaction export flow. For reconciliation purposes, every discrepancy and its corresponding refund are accounted for.

You'll also receive a webhook notification for each auto-refunded transaction, so your downstream systems stay in sync with every refund event without requiring manual dashboard monitoring.

Note

For payments that trigger an auto-refund, two fees apply:

• Collection processing fee — charged for receiving the payment, as with any standard collection

• Refund processing fee — charged for initiating the automatic refund

This is the same fee structure that applies when refunds are initiated manually. The automation doesn't change the cost model. It changes the operational effort required from your team, which goes from manual action to zero.

What this changes in practice

Before Auto Refund:
A customer sends ₦4,700 instead of ₦5,000. The payment lands in your account. Your team notices the discrepancy during reconciliation, locates the transaction, manually initiates a ₦4,700 refund, and logs it. The customer waits. The process repeats for every similar discrepancy that week.

After Auto Refund:
A customer sends ₦4,700 instead of ₦5,000. The payment lands in your account. The system detects the discrepancy, initiates the refund automatically, records both the collection and the refund on your dashboard, and sends a webhook notification. The customer receives their money back within the standard refund timeline. Your team did nothing.

Things worth knowing

The feature is opt-in. Auto Refund is disabled by default. You choose whether to enable it based on your operational preferences. If you prefer to review discrepancies manually before initiating refunds, you can leave the setting off and continue with your current process.

Both underpayments and overpayments are covered. The automation handles both directions of discrepancy — there's no separate configuration for each type.

Your webhook integration stays in sync. Every auto-refund triggers a webhook notification, which means your downstream systems — order management, customer communication, reconciliation — can respond to refund events programmatically without dashboard monitoring.

Reconciliation stays clean. Because both the collection and the refund are recorded as linked entries on your dashboard, your transaction history remains accurate and fully exportable. Month-end reconciliation doesn't require manual exception handling for discrepancy cases.

Payment discrepancies are a structural reality of African payment environments. Auto Refund doesn't eliminate them — it just means they're no longer your team's problem to resolve one by one.

Enable it once. Let the system handle the rest.