Refunds and Cancellation

1. Which refund are you looking for

Kessel is software a business uses to ring up a sale. The business sells; we do not. So there are two refunds with the same word on them, and they are asked for in two different places.

If a Kessel receipt is all you have and you cannot work out which business it came from, email hello@usekessel.com with the receipt number and we will tell you who they are and how to reach them. That is the whole of what we can do on somebody else’s sale.

If you believe a charge is fraudulent rather than unwanted, your own bank’s dispute process is the right route and you do not need our permission to use it. The business will be asked for evidence, and Kessel will hand them the receipt, the entry method and the approval result to answer with.

2. Cancelling the software

• Cancel in the console, at any time. It takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for, and nothing is switched off before then.
• There is no notice period, no termination fee, no retention script and no requirement to speak to anybody.
• We do not bill you again after you cancel. If we do, section 3 covers it.
• Cancelling is not deleting. Your data stays exportable as CSV for 90 days; if you want it erased sooner, ask at privacy@usekessel.com.
• A hardware lease or finance plan does not cancel with the software. Section 5 says what happens to it and why.

3. Refunds on the $49

The software is billed monthly in advance and we do not refund part of a month. You had the month, and pro-rating $49 costs both of us more to argue about than it is worth. What we do refund, we refund in full and without asking you to justify it:

• A month billed after you cancelled. Our mistake, returned in full.
• A duplicate charge.
• Anything charged during the 30-day free trial. Nothing should be, and if something was, it goes back.
• A month billed for a location you had already closed in the console.

Outside those four, ask anyway. A month nobody used because the account was set up and then forgotten is a conversation we would rather have than keep $49 from a business that is not using the product. There is deliberately no sentence here for us to hide behind: it is a judgement, and a person makes it.

A refund goes back to the card or bank account that paid, never as account credit, and then takes as long as your bank takes — usually five to ten business days after we send it.

4. Refunding your own customer: what the fees do

This is the part that surprises people, so it gets its own section. When you refund a customer, the customer gets the whole amount back. The processing fee you paid on the original sale does not come back to you.

• We charge nothing to make a refund. There is no refund fee, and no monthly minimum that a refunded month can fall below.
• Stripe does not return the processing fee from the original sale. That is Stripe’s policy under your agreement with them, it applies to every business on Stripe whatever software they run, and we neither control it nor take a share of it.
• So a refunded sale leaves you out of pocket by the fee on it: the interchange the networks took, plus our 0.90% + 30c, or the flat rate if you are on one.
• A refund is paid out of your Stripe balance. If the balance is short, Stripe recovers the difference from your bank account under its own agreement.
• A partial refund returns the part you name and is recorded against the original order, so the books, the receipt sequence and the stock movement still reconcile.

A chargeback is not a refund. The cardholder’s bank decides it, the money moves whether you agree or not, and the network usually adds a fee. Section 11 of the Terms covers them. Kessel assembles the evidence and drafts the response; nobody can promise an outcome, and anybody who does is selling something.

5. Hardware, leases and finance plans

Readers are Stripe Terminal hardware bought through us. The warranty and the return window are therefore Stripe’s, and what we add is that we deal with Stripe rather than handing you a support link.

• A reader that arrives faulty, or fails inside the manufacturer warranty: tell us and we make the claim. You do not talk to Stripe.
• A reader you simply do not want: returnable unused and in its packaging within the window Stripe’s hardware terms set. TO BE CONFIRMED — the window we commit to in writing, which should be at least Stripe’s and may be longer.
• Return shipping on a working reader is yours. On a faulty one it is ours.
• A lease: title stays with us for the term, so ending one early ends the lease and the hardware comes back to us.
• A finance plan: the hardware becomes yours on full payment, so ending one early means paying the balance rather than returning the box.
• A plan still open when you cancel Kessel becomes payable, because it was being collected out of card volume that has stopped. We will agree a schedule rather than issue one invoice for the lot. TO BE CONFIRMED — whether an early payoff carries a discount for finance cost not yet incurred. It should.

A plan’s term and total are fixed before you order and do not move afterwards. That is section 6 of the Terms and nothing here changes it.

6. How to ask, and how long we take

Email hello@usekessel.com and say what happened. An invoice number or the date of the charge is enough; you do not need a form, a reference or a reason you are willing to defend.

• We reply within one business day and decide within five.
• If we say no, we say why in a sentence you can argue with, not a policy number.
• If we say yes, the refund leaves the same day and your bank takes it from there.
• Nothing about your account changes because you asked. Asking for a refund is not a black mark and there is no list.

7. What this document is

This explains how we apply sections 5, 6, 7, 11 and 16 of the Terms of Service. It is not a separate contract and it takes nothing away from what those sections give you; where the two disagree, the Terms govern. Where it promises something the Terms do not — the reply times in section 6, the four automatic refunds in section 3 — that is a commitment we are making and are willing to be held to. A merchant’s own refund policy toward their customers is theirs alone and is governed by neither document.