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inverse_shakil
Community Member

Automatically refund given without notice

Hi, 

 

I suddenly received a notification that upwork given refund of last weeks hour. why is that? from my pending payments, amounts are gone! Can any enlight me what happened? 

22 REPLIES 22
prestonhunter
Community Member

There are certain conditions under which refunds may be initiated without a freelancer's input.


For example, if you logged manual time on an hourly contract, a client may ask to have that time removed or refunded.

I have talked to my client, he said he did not ask for refund.


Md. Syful Islam S wrote:

I have talked to my client, he said he did not ask for refund.


Tell him to get it together and reply to the email that his credit card failed and stop trying to be purposely obtuse.

Hi Md. Syful Islam,

 

When the client fails to pay for hours logged by the freelancer, any hours that aren't covered by Upwork Hourly Protection may be reversed. Please, check out this help article for more information.

Our team will reach out to you directly via email with more information about your specific case.

 

Thank you! 

~ Bojan
Upwork

Waiting for the email, thanks.

Hi i am still waiting for contact team to be in touch with me.

Hi Md. Syful Islam,

 

A member of the team has reached out to you just recently. If you aren't able to see the email you should also be able to access the ticket directly here.

 

Thank you!

~ Bojan
Upwork
799e736b
Community Member

Same thing just happened to me. Could you please have someone look into this?

Thank you in advance 

BojanS
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi Ali,

 

I'm sorry to hear about that. Our team will reach out to you directly with more information.

 

Thank you! 

~ Bojan
Upwork
799e736b
Community Member

Still waiting for email.

Hi Ali,

 

I can confirm that the team already reached out to you via this support ticket. Kindly refer to it if you have any questions so they can assist you further.

 

Thank you,

~ Luiggi
Upwork
799e736b
Community Member

Hi Luiggi,

 

The client in my case is trying to solve the credit card issue but Upwork has put his account on hold. He says he opened a support ticket 4 days ago but Upwork still investigating meanwhile I am hurting as I need that money to process as early as possible. Can you please expedite his ticket?

 

Thank you!

Hi Ali,

 

Thank you for your message. I am sorry to hear about your client's account. I am unable to discuss other user's accounts with you. You may want to request your client to contact us directly so that we can better assist them.

 

Thank you

Pradeep

Upwork
georgejonesiv
Community Member

I had this happen to me a couple of weeks ago. Threw my entire finacial situation into a tailspin. I got on the phone with Upwork and ended up spending north of 2hrs on the phone with support over it. It still hasn't been resolved. The sheer number of time the CSR said "I understand your frustration" ticked me off to no end, causing my blood pressure to skyrocket which had my wife genuinely concerned that I might pass out or end up having a stroke (my face was tingling and everything). 

 

The long and short of it was that my client's card declined. Even though Upwork guarantees payment for time worked to the freelancer if it's tracked in the app, that doesn't mean every bit of time will get paid in a situation like this. In my case I'm doing a lot of work that requires a lot of kicking off process and staring at the screen waiting for pertinent data to pop up or waiting for stuff to happen. Upwork's team didn't like the time logged for that kind of stuff and subsequently docked my pay for every time I did work but there was low activity. I was also docked for times where the time tracker took a blank screenshot (due to no fault of my own, it's running on Ubuntu 16.04 and appears to have this issue at random) and for manual time entered for a business related phonecall between myself and the client. The amount docked represented roughly a third of my pay for that week. I'm still trying to recover from it. The CSR kept trying to get my client involved but that was completely unnecessary as neither I nor my client triggered the refund; it was 100% Upwork's doing.

Sorry to hear that. Luckily my client responded right way, and sent the payment as bonus. I am also using ubuntu 18.04. As i have a team with me, i needed to use other software for timetracking. so at weekend we show the reports from that software and then insert manual hours on upwork. I didn't face this issue before. so got quite anxious about it. All good now. But upwork should have live chat system or more convincing email where it should explain what happened, or notice before the refund. My client also got confused why this had happened! 


George J wrote:

I had this happen to me a couple of weeks ago. Threw my entire finacial situation into a tailspin. I got on the phone with Upwork and ended up spending north of 2hrs on the phone with support over it.


What a monumental waste of their (and your) time

 


George J wrote:

The long and short of it was that my client's card declined.


Right. The client failed to pay Upwork, so Upwork paid you out of their own pocket for the hours that were covered by the protection.

 


George J wrote:

The CSR kept trying to get my client involved but that was completely unnecessary


How so? You client is the one who failed to pay for your work, so obviously your client is the one who needs to put it right by paying you what they owe you. (The hours that were not covered by the protection and Upwork did not pay you out of their own pocket.)

 


George J wrote:

...neither I nor my client triggered the refund; it was 100% Upwork's doing.


It's not actually a refund. It is a reversal of funds that were never paid by your client in the first place.

All your client needs to do is sort out their credit card and pay you.

szubkov
Community Member

I have the same situation. The work was done, but suddenly the payment was automatically refunded.

The question is: why do I get to know about that so late? If the manual hours are not protected by UpWork, then UpWork should immediately report me about all the failed payments during the review period already! It would be correct. Because I have to take care of my protection myself - it means I need to know what is happening during the "week of review".

a_lipsey
Community Member


Sergey Z wrote:

I have the same situation. The work was done, but suddenly the payment was automatically refunded.

The question is: why do I get to know about that so late? If the manual hours are not protected by UpWork, then UpWork should immediately report me about all the failed payments during the review period already! It would be correct. Because I have to take care of my protection myself - it means I need to know what is happening during the "week of review".


Which week was refunded and when did you get notified? Clients have 5 days to review the prior week's hours, starting on Monday. So likely you do not get notified until the following week. That may seem like not fast enough for you, but it follows the payment process, there's nothing secretive about it. You've been here a while so you should know how long clients have to dispute hours. 

2e0d2ba8
Community Member

Hi,
Suddenly i got the same automatically refunded notification and the amount gone. Could you please have a look on this ?
Thanks in advance.

Hi Mutasim,

 

I checked your account and it looks like one of our team members reached out to you already to provide more information about this. You may check the ticket by going here

~ Joanne
Upwork
57adc0fb
Community Member

Hi,
i got the same automatically refunded notification and the amount gone (for last 2 weeks). Could you please have a look on this ?
Thanks in advance.

Hi Arthur,

 

Thank you for reaching out to us. I checked and it looks like one of our agents already reached out to you directly via a support ticket to assist you further. You can access your ticket on this page.

If you have further questions or need additional assistance feel free to follow up with our team directly on your ticket and they will be happy to assist you.

 

~ Nikola
Upwork
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