A card payment from a Saturday in December is disputed twelve weeks later. You have a deadline, a form asking for evidence, and no record of who was served, by whom, or what they ordered.

An email arrives on a Tuesday in March. A card payment from a Saturday night in December has been disputed. There is a deadline, a form, and a request for evidence.

The night in question was three months and roughly ninety trading nights ago. Nobody remembers the table. The person who took the payment left in January. What you have is a line in a settlement report saying an amount was taken, and that is not evidence of anything.

⚠️ What this page cannot tell you

⛔ What a chargeback is, what your rights are, what evidence is accepted, what the deadlines are and what it costs you are all determined by the card schemes and by your agreement with your acquirer or payment provider. They differ by scheme, by reason code, by country, and by contract.

⛔ This page is not that and cannot substitute for it. ⭕ Ask your payment provider for their disputes process and their evidence requirements in writing, before you need it.

⭕ What follows is the operational half only: what you need to have kept in December in order to answer in March.

⇒ The Card Fees You Have Never Renegotiated

Why venues lose these more often than other businesses

A shop with a delivery address and a signed receipt is in a strong position. A venue is in a weak one, for four structural reasons.

The gap is long

⇒ Twelve weeks is normal and it can be longer. ⚠️ Nothing in a venue survives twelve weeks unless it was written down, and most of what happens is not.

Nobody knows which transaction it was

⭕ A settlement line gives an amount and a time. It does not give a table, a server, or an order, and those are exactly what the form asks about.

The staff have moved on

⚠️ The person who served that table is not there in March. ⭕ Recollection was never available as a strategy, even though most venues discover that only at this point.

⇒ The Shift Where Everyone Is New

And the deadline is short

⚠️ You have days, not weeks, and it arrives with no warning. ⭕ A response assembled under time pressure from records that were never designed for it is a response that loses.

What is actually being claimed

The reason matters, because different reasons need different things.

They say it was not them

⇒ The most common claim. ⚠️ This is the one that most needs to be answered with what was served and to whom, and the one venues are least equipped to answer.

They say they did not get what they paid for

⭕ A booking not honoured, a table not available, a package not delivered. What was promised and what was provided is the whole question, and it is a documentation question.

⇒ The Deposit You Never Take

They say the amount is wrong

⚠️ A tab that grew, an amount added at close, a service charge they did not expect. ⭕ This is very often a genuine misunderstanding, and it is the category most preventable at the point of sale.

⇒ The Bar Tab That Walks

And sometimes it is a card that was genuinely misused

⛔ This one is not a dispute you should be trying to win. ⚠️ What you must do in that situation is a question for your provider and possibly for the police — ask what applies rather than deciding it yourself.

What is worth having kept

None of this is exotic. All of it is a matter of whether somebody decided to keep it before it was needed.

The itemised transaction, not the total

⇒ ⭕ What was actually ordered, line by line, tied to that payment. A total is a number; an itemised order is an account of a night.

Which table and which server

⚠️ ⭕ This single field turns "we cannot say" into "here is who served them". Most systems can record it; most venues never set it up.

⇒ Bottle Service And Table Management

The time the payment was taken

⇒ Not the time the tab opened. ⭕ The moment of payment is what matches the settlement line, and matching is the first thing you have to do before you can say anything else.

Whether it was a card present or not

⚠️ ⛔ How much this matters, and what protection it gives you, is a question for your provider. ⭕ But recording it costs nothing and you will be asked.

And anything the guest signed or confirmed

⇒ A tab authorisation, a booking confirmation, a terms acceptance. ⭕ Whatever exists, keep it with the transaction rather than in a separate system nobody will search in March.

The record that answers the question

There is one shape of record that answers almost every version of this, and it is short.

One line per payment, with five fields

When   — the exact time of the payment
What   — the itemised order, not the total
Where  — the table or the position at the bar
Who    — the member of staff who took it
How    — card present or not, and the last four digits

⭕ That is the entire requirement, and any system that produces it makes March survivable.

It has to be searchable by amount and date

⚠️ Because that is all the dispute notice gives you. ⭕ If you cannot go from "that amount on 14 December" to a specific order in under a minute, you do not have a usable record, however carefully it was kept.

And it has to survive staff leaving

⇒ ⭕ A record that requires somebody to interpret it is not a record. The test is whether a person who was not there can read it.

⇒ The Report You Open Every Monday

What reduces them happening at all

Answering well is the second-best outcome. Not receiving them is the first.

Say the amount out loud before taking it

⭕ The most effective single intervention on this page. A guest who heard the number and agreed to it disputes far less often than one who saw it only on a terminal.

Close tabs with the person present

⚠️ A tab closed after the guest has left is the classic origin of a March dispute. ⭕ Whatever the practice is, the moment of closing is the moment to decide it.

⇒ The Bar Tab That Walks

Make the descriptor recognisable

⚠️ ⭕ A guest who cannot recognise the name on their statement disputes it. If your trading name and your card descriptor differ, that difference generates disputes on its own — ask your provider what yours says.

Put the venue name on anything they take away

⇒ A receipt, a confirmation, a message. ⭕ Something in their pocket with your name on it is worth more than anything you can say twelve weeks later.

And resolve the argument on the night

⇒ The Refund You Argue About

What it costs beyond the money

Worth naming, because the amount disputed is usually the smallest part.

The fee is charged whether you win or lose

⚠️ ⭕ Most agreements charge a handling fee per dispute regardless of outcome. Check what yours is; operators are routinely surprised.

The ratio is monitored

⛔ Card schemes monitor dispute ratios and there are consequences above certain thresholds. ⚠️ What those are for your business is a question for your provider, asked now rather than after a bad quarter.

The time is the real cost

⇒ ⭕ Somebody spends two hours reconstructing a night from fragments. Two hours of a manager, per dispute, is almost always more than the amount in question.

⇒ The Profitable Month That Runs Out Of Cash

And you cannot see the pattern without the record

⭕ Three disputes in a quarter from the same night of the week, or the same server, or the same package is a finding. Without a record it is three unrelated annoyances.

The half hour that prepares for it

One: ask your provider for the process in writing

⇒ ⭕ How you are notified, how long you have, what evidence they accept, what it costs. Four questions, one email, before you need it.

Two: find out what your descriptor says

⚠️ Look at an actual statement, not what you think it says. This is a five-minute check that removes a whole category of dispute.

Three: check you can go from amount and date to an order

⭕ Pick a Saturday from three months ago and try it. ⚠️ If it takes more than a minute, that is the finding.

Four: decide who handles one when it arrives

⇒ ⭕ A named person, because the deadline is short and the notice arrives in a shared inbox that nobody has decided is theirs.

Five: keep the payment record with everything else

⇒ The Cash-Up That Takes An Hour

What good looks like

The one-minute test

Take an amount and a date from three months ago and find the order. ⇒ Under a minute means you can answer in March. Longer means you cannot.

The descriptor test

⚠️ Read your card descriptor as a guest would. If you cannot tell it is you, neither can they.

The handler test

Working     — one named person opens the notice the day it arrives
Not working — it sits in a shared inbox until the deadline is close

Three to hold

1  A settlement line is not evidence — the itemised order tied to it is
2  Saying the amount out loud before taking it prevents more than any evidence answers
3  If you cannot go from amount and date to an order in a minute, you will lose by default

Where the record has to sit

The time, the itemisation, the table, the server and the card details for every payment — in one place that can be searched by amount and date, months later, by somebody who was not working that night. Kept there, a dispute in March is twenty minutes of work with a real answer at the end. Kept nowhere, it is two hours of reconstruction that produces a settlement line and an apology, and the outcome of that is decided before you start.