Refund and cancellation policy

Last updated 5 November 2026

A starting point, not legal advice. This describes honestly how PayCert behaves and what we will do. Have it reviewed against your own circumstances before relying on it commercially.

First, which money are we talking about?

There are two completely separate things, and this policy only covers one of them.

Payment	Covered here?
Your PayCert subscription What you pay us monthly to use the software	Yes. This page.
A claim your client paid you Money that went into your own bank account	No. See refunding your own client.

PayCert never holds, receives or controls the money your clients pay you. When a client pays a claim online, it settles directly from your own Paystack account into your own bank account. We therefore cannot refund it, reverse it, or step into a dispute about it: we have no access to those funds at any point.

The free trial

Every account starts with a 14-day free trial with no card needed, so there is nothing to refund for the trial. If you don't choose a plan, your account simply turns read-only when the trial ends.

Cancelling your subscription

The account owner can cancel any time under Settings, Plan and billing, using Update card or cancel. It takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for, not immediately, because you paid for that month.

You keep full access until your current paid month ends.
No further payments are taken after you cancel.
Nothing is deleted. Your projects, claims, documents and history stay on file, read-only.
Viewing, downloads and the full data export keep working, so you can take all of your data with you.
Choosing a plan again later restores access to the same data.

There is no cancellation fee, no notice period and no minimum term.

Your cooling-off right

If you subscribed within the last seven days and want to undo it, contact us and we will refund that payment in full. You don't have to explain why.

This matches the cooling-off right consumers have for online purchases under section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, and we give it to businesses too.

When we will refund you

Within seven days of subscribing: a full refund, no reason needed.
You were charged twice for the same month: we refund the duplicate.
A billing error on our side: the wrong plan, the wrong amount, or a charge after you cancelled. We refund the difference.
An extended outage that was our fault: if PayCert was unusable for a meaningful part of a month, we refund that part.
We closed your account without cause: we refund the unused portion of what you paid.

When we will not

Part months. Cancelling mid-month does not produce a pro-rata refund; you keep access for the rest of the month instead.
Months you didn't get round to using. The subscription is for the software being available to you, not for how much of it you used.
Payment provider fees. The fee Paystack takes on your clients' claim payments is Paystack's, not ours, and we cannot return it.
Accounts closed for fraud or unlawful use.

None of this limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act or the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.

Refunding your own client

If you need to give money back to a client who paid one of your claims, that is between you and them, and it happens in two steps:

Refund the transaction in your own Paystack dashboard (or by EFT if they paid that way). That is where the money actually is.
Remove the payment from the claim in PayCert (on the claim, under Payments received), and if you issued a tax invoice, issue a credit note against it in your accounting system.

Doing only the first leaves your records, and your VAT position, showing income you gave back. Doing only the second leaves your client out of pocket.

Which refunds are automatic

Two situations involve no judgement on our part, so the software handles them straight away from Settings, Plan and billing. The account owner presses a button and it's done, with no email and no waiting:

Inside the seven-day cooling-off window after you first subscribe. A full refund, no reason required. Your subscription ends at the same moment and nothing more is charged.
A duplicate charge. If you were billed twice for the same plan, we return the extra payment. Your access is unaffected, because the original payment still stands.

Everything else is looked at by a person. Deciding whether an outage was our fault, or whether an account was closed unfairly, is a judgement, and we would rather make it properly than have software guess.

Automatic refunds are limited to one per account. A genuine duplicate charge is always returned, even if you have had a refund before. Refunds go back through Paystack to the card or account that was charged.

How to ask for a refund

Start at Settings, Plan and billing. Before you press anything it tells you whether your case is automatic or needs a person, and why. If it needs a person, tell us what happened there and it comes straight to us.

You can also email paycert.build@gmail.com, or send us a message, with the email address on your account and roughly when the payment was taken. You don't need a reference number.

For anything that needs a person, we respond within one business day (Mon to Fri, 08:00 to 17:00 SAST). Approved refunds are processed within five business days and go back to the card that was charged. Your bank may then take a further three to ten days to show it, which is out of our hands. Automatic refunds skip the first step and are sent the moment you press the button.

If we turn a refund down, we will tell you why, in writing, referring to this page.