Chargebacks Explained: How Card Disputes Work in Singapore

A chargeback is a forced reversal through the card network, and in Singapore, the usual window to start one is 120 days

A chargeback is what happens when you ask your card issuer, rather than the merchant, to claw back money from a card payment. The issuer takes the claim to the card network, and the network pulls the funds from the merchant’s bank.

It’s the last resort, not the first move. Every issuer expects you to try the merchant first, and most disputes get resolved faster that way. Chargebacks exist for the cases where that doesn’t work: the goods never arrived, the charge ran twice, the subscription you cancelled billed you anyway, or the transaction wasn’t yours at all.

The part that catches businesses out is the clock. The general guidance in Singapore gives you 120 days from the transaction date, but your own issuer’s deadline is usually much shorter, and that shorter one is the deadline that actually binds you. On a YouBiz card, it’s 45 days.

Quick Answers: Deadlines, Costs and Who Pays

Question	Short Answer
What is a chargeback?	A reversal of a card payment, forced through the card network by your card issuer rather than agreed with the merchant.
How long do I have to file one?	120 days from the transaction date under general Singapore guidance. Your issuer sets its own shorter window, and on a YouBiz card it’s 45 days.
How long does it take?	9 to 12 weeks on a YouBiz card, and longer if the merchant contests it.
Who ends up paying?	The merchant, in most cases. Their bank debits the amount from them, and their payment processor usually adds a fee on top.
Does it cost me anything?	No, unless the claim is false. A S$20 handling fee applies on a YouBiz card if an investigation proves a false declaration.
Is it the same as a refund?	No. A refund is the merchant paying you back voluntarily. A chargeback is the network taking the money back without their agreement.

Chargebacks are widely written about under US federal law, which has no effect in Singapore. What applies here is a mix of card-network rules, your issuer’s own filing deadlines, and a narrow set of local protections that stop short of company accounts.

Table of Contents

1. What Is a Chargeback
2. Chargeback vs Refund
3. How the Chargeback Process Works
4. The Main Types of Chargeback
5. Chargeback Time Limits in Singapore
6. Who Actually Loses Money in a Chargeback
7. Do Chargebacks Hurt a Business
8. How Chargebacks Are Treated in Accounting
9. What Protects a Business Account in Singapore
10. How to Raise a Chargeback on Your YouBiz Card
11. What Happens After You Submit
12. If Your Business Receives a Chargeback
13. How to Reduce Chargebacks on Company Cards
14. FAQs

What Is a Chargeback

A chargeback is a formal process to recover funds from a disputed card transaction, run through the card network instead of through the merchant. Mastercard and Visa both operate one, and the rules that decide the outcome are the network’s rules rather than Singapore law.

Running it through the network is why chargebacks take so long. You’re not asking a merchant for your money. You’re asking your issuer to open a case against another bank, and the two banks answer each other on fixed schedules rather than on yours.

Five parties are involved, and it’s worth knowing which is which when you’re chasing an update:

• The cardholder. You, or the employee holding the company card, who raises the dispute.
• The issuer. The company that gave you the card and holds your funds. For a YouBiz card, that’s us.
• The card network. Mastercard or Visa, which sets the reason codes, the deadlines and the evidence standard.
• The acquirer. The merchant’s bank or payment processor, which receives the claim and passes it on.
• The merchant. The business that took the payment, and the party that usually ends up out of pocket.

Chargebacks were designed as consumer protection, and that origin still shapes them. The rules lean towards the cardholder on evidence, which is why merchants who can’t produce delivery proof or a signed authorisation tend to lose. It’s also why a claim with no documentation behind it tends to fail: the process rewards whoever brings the better paperwork.

Our full YouBiz guide covers how the account and cards work if you’re new to the product.

Chargeback vs Refund

A refund is money the merchant sends back voluntarily. A chargeback is money the network takes back whether the merchant agrees or not. The distinction sounds academic until you’re deciding which one to chase, because the wrong choice costs you weeks.

Ask for a refund when the merchant is still responsive. It’s faster, it costs the merchant nothing beyond the sale, and you’ll usually see the money in days rather than months. A merchant who’s willing to refund has no reason to make you wait.

Raise a chargeback when the merchant has stopped replying, refuses, or has closed down. At that point there’s nobody to negotiate with, and the network is the only route left.

	Refund	Chargeback
Who decides	The merchant	The card network, on evidence
Typical speed	Days	9 to 12 weeks
Merchant consent	Required	Not required
Cost to the merchant	The sale value	The sale value plus a processing fee
Paperwork you need	Usually none	Correspondence, receipts, proof of the problem

One practical warning: don’t run both at once. If the merchant refunds you while a chargeback is open, you can end up credited twice, and the correction that follows is slower and messier than either process on its own. If a refund lands after you’ve filed, tell your issuer so the claim doesn’t run on.

The same “two similar terms, different mechanics” trap shows up in expense claims, which we cover in disbursement vs reimbursement.

How the Chargeback Process Works

The chargeback process runs in five stages, and each one has a deadline attached. Knowing the shape of it tells you where your case is when nothing seems to be happening.

The Five Stages of a Chargeback

Step 1: You file the dispute with your issuer. You submit the transaction details, the reason, and your evidence. The issuer checks whether the claim fits a valid reason code and whether you’re inside the filing window.

Step 2: The issuer assigns a reason code and files with the network. Reason codes are the network’s categories for what went wrong, and the code chosen decides what evidence the merchant has to produce to defeat the claim.

Step 3: The funds are provisionally pulled from the merchant. The acquirer debits the merchant’s account. At this stage, the money has left the merchant, but it isn’t final.

Step 4: The merchant can contest it. Contesting a chargeback is called representment. The merchant sends back evidence that the charge was valid, such as a delivery confirmation, an IP log, or your signature, and if the network accepts it the chargeback is reversed, and the original charge stands. If they don’t respond in time, you keep the money.

Step 5: The network decides, or the case escalates to arbitration. Most cases end here. A small number go to arbitration, where the network rules on the evidence and charges the losing side a fee.

A Worked Example: A Software Licence That Never Arrived

Say a company card is charged S$4,200 for a software licence in March, the vendor never provisions the seats, and three emails go unanswered. You file in April with the invoice and the email thread.

The S$4,200 is pulled from the vendor within weeks, and the vendor gets a defined window to answer. If they can’t show the seats were delivered, the credit sticks. Start to finish, that’s a two-to-three-month round trip for a charge that took two seconds to make.

Payment rails all have their own timing quirks, and the same is true of local transfers, which we cover in our guide to GIRO payments in Singapore.

The Main Types of Chargeback

Chargebacks fall into three families: problems with the goods or services, transaction errors, and unauthorised use. The Consumers Association of Singapore (CASE) publishes the categories used here, and most issuers work to the same list.

Category	What it covers	What you need to show
Goods or services not received	Nothing arrived, or the service was never delivered	Written attempts to resolve with the merchant, the promised delivery date, and proof it passed
Not as described, defective or returned	What arrived didn’t match the listing, was damaged, or was returned	The original description, evidence of the defect, proof of return or cancellation
Duplicate processing	The same transaction was charged twice	Both charges, matching in amount, date and merchant
Paid by other means	You settled the bill by cash, transfer or another card	Proof of the alternative payment, plus contact attempts
Incorrect amount or currency	The amount was altered or processed wrongly	Documentation of the amount you authorised
Cancelled recurring transaction	A subscription billed after you cancelled	Evidence the cancellation was made and received before the charge
Unauthorised transaction	You didn’t make or authorise the charge	A police report where the card was lost, stolen or used fraudulently

Two categories cause most of the confusion in practice.

Cancelled subscriptions need proof the cancellation landed. Clicking cancel in a dashboard isn’t evidence on its own. Keep the confirmation email, and if there wasn’t one, screenshot the account page showing the cancelled state with the date visible.

“Not as described” is not the same as “I changed my mind”. Buyer’s remorse isn’t a chargeback reason, and a claim filed under this code without evidence of a real discrepancy will usually fail at representment.

You’ll also see chargebacks referred to by the merchant’s name in everyday use, as in a Grab chargeback or a Shopee chargeback. Those aren’t separate types. They’re ordinary disputes that happen to involve those platforms, and they run under the same reason codes as everything else.

Clear categories only help if the spending behind them is documented, which is what a written company expense policy is for.

Chargeback Time Limits in Singapore

Two clocks run at once: the card network’s outer limit and your issuer’s own filing window. CASE’s general guidance gives consumers 120 days from the transaction date to ask for a chargeback. Your issuer sets a shorter window inside that, and missing the issuer’s deadline ends the claim regardless of how much of the 120 days is left.

Card	Window to report	Investigation time
YouBiz card	45 days from the transaction date	9 to 12 weeks
YouTrip card	70 days from the transaction date for unrecognised transactions	Up to 12 weeks
General CASE guidance	120 days from the transaction date	Varies by issuer

The gap between 45 days and 120 days is the trap. A quarterly expense review that catches a duplicate charge from four months ago has caught it too late on most cards, even though the general guidance suggests there’s still time.

How to Stay Inside the Window

Reconcile card transactions monthly, not quarterly. A monthly close catches a bad charge inside every filing window in the table above. A quarterly one catches it inside none of them.

Start the clock from the transaction date, not the statement date. The US rule that counts from the billing statement doesn’t apply here, and assuming it does costs you weeks.

One exception applies where delivery is scheduled for a future date. The waiting period then runs from when delivery was due rather than from when you paid, because you can’t claim non-delivery before the delivery date has passed.

Catching these in time is a bookkeeping problem more than a payments problem, and our bookkeeping guide for Singapore businesses covers the monthly close in detail.

Who Actually Loses Money in a Chargeback

The merchant loses the money in most chargebacks. Their acquirer debits the transaction amount from their account, and their payment processor usually adds a chargeback fee on top, so a contested sale can cost more than the sale was worth.

The cardholder is normally made whole, provided the claim succeeds. The funds return to the account the card draws from, and on a debit-style card like YouBiz that means the money goes back into your currency wallet.

The issuer carries the cost in a narrower set of cases. Where a fraudulent transaction was properly authenticated, or where the merchant successfully defends the claim but the cardholder is still not liable, the loss can sit with the card issuer rather than the merchant.

Where liability sits depends on authentication. If a merchant requires 3D Secure and the transaction is authenticated, liability for fraud generally shifts away from the merchant. If the merchant skips that step, they usually keep it.

Liability shift is the reason online merchants push you through an OTP screen at checkout. The added friction costs them a few abandoned baskets and moves the cost of fraud off their books.

For a business paying overseas vendors, the same liability split is worth remembering when choosing how to pay. Card payments carry chargeback rights that bank transfers don’t, which is one of the arguments in our guide to paying overseas suppliers from Singapore.

Do Chargebacks Hurt a Business

Yes, and the damage runs past the lost sale. A business that takes card payments and accumulates chargebacks faces three separate costs, and the third, a rising chargeback ratio, carries the heaviest penalties.

You lose the sale and the goods. The amount is debited back, and in a non-delivery or fraud case the stock has usually already shipped, so you’re out both.

You pay a fee per chargeback. Your payment processor debits a dispute fee alongside the disputed amount as soon as the claim is raised. Whether you get that fee back after winning depends on your processor, so check what your own agreement says.

A high chargeback ratio triggers network fines. Card networks require merchants to keep chargebacks below a set threshold. Exceed it, and the network places you in a monitoring programme, where monthly fines and additional fees apply until your dispute levels come down and stay down.

The ratio is why merchants fight low-value chargebacks that look uneconomic to contest. They’re not defending the sale value; they’re defending a ratio that gets expensive to breach.

A pattern in your chargebacks usually points to something fixable. A cluster of “not as described” claims tends to mean a product listing that oversells, and a cluster of “not received” claims tends to mean a fulfilment problem. Treating every chargeback as fraud means missing those causes.

Where the money lands matters too, and our comparison of the best business account in Singapore sets out the options for SG companies.

How Chargebacks Are Treated in Accounting

A chargeback is recorded as a reversal of the original transaction, not as a new expense. How you book it depends on which side of the payment you were on.

As the cardholder, reverse the original expense. The successful chargeback credit cancels the cost you booked when the charge went through. If the expense was recognised in a prior period that’s already closed, book the credit in the current period rather than reopening the old one.

As the merchant, reverse the revenue and book the fee separately. The disputed amount comes out of sales, in the same way a refund would, and the processor’s chargeback fee is a bank or merchant service charge. Keeping the two apart matters, because the fee is a real cost of doing business that the sales reversal alone won’t show you.

Track disputes in progress rather than waiting for the outcome. A filed but undecided chargeback is money that may or may not come back, so it shouldn’t sit in your books as settled either way. Flag it so a provisional debit doesn’t look like an unexplained bank difference at month end.

If your business is GST-registered and a sale is reversed, the output tax you accounted for needs adjusting as well. IRAS treats returned goods as an abortive sale. Where a tax invoice was issued, you issue a credit note adjusting the GST at the rate originally charged, then reduce your standard-rated supplies and output tax accordingly. The credit note has to reference the original tax invoice.

IRAS’s published guidance covers returns and cancellations rather than chargebacks by name, so confirm the treatment of a forced reversal with your accountant before filing the return.

Doing any of this by hand gets old quickly, and our review of accounting software for Singapore businesses covers the tools that automate the matching.

What Protects a Business Account in Singapore

The consumer protections most people have heard of don’t cover a company’s card transactions. Knowing what does apply changes how carefully you treat the filing deadline.

MAS’s E-Payments User Protection Guidelines don’t cover company accounts. The Guidelines define a “protected account” as one held in the name of persons who are all either individuals or sole proprietors. A Private Limited company’s account falls outside that definition, so a Pte Ltd doesn’t get the baseline protection the Guidelines set out.

The Guidelines’ liability rules don’t apply to card transactions at all. A footnote in the Guidelines states plainly that the liability apportionment they set out does not apply to transactions on credit cards, charge cards and debit cards issued in Singapore. Those sit under the Association of Banks in Singapore’s Code of Practice instead. So even a sole proprietor, whose account can qualify as protected, doesn’t get those liability caps on card spend.

The S$100 liability cap is a credit card rule. CASE’s guidance notes that a consumer’s liability for unauthorised credit card transactions before reporting is capped at S$100, provided they weren’t fraudulent or grossly negligent and reported promptly. A YouBiz card operates like a debit card rather than a credit card, so that cap doesn’t apply to it.

What Applies Instead

The card network’s rules and your issuer’s dispute process are what actually protect you. As a Principal Member of Mastercard, we process and protect card transactions according to Mastercard’s rules and standards. Your funds are held in a dedicated customer segregated account with OCBC Bank, kept separate from our own company accounts. YouBiz is a major payment institution licensed under the Payment Services Act and regulated by MAS.

Your recourse on a company card therefore runs through the chargeback process and the network’s rules. Filing inside the window is what gets your money back, and if you miss it, there’s no law that recovers it for you.

Whether your entity is a Pte Ltd or a sole proprietorship changes more than your tax bill, and our comparison of sole proprietorship vs Pte Ltd covers the other differences.

How to Raise a Chargeback on Your YouBiz Card

Lock the card first, then gather evidence, then file. Doing it in that order stops a compromised card from running up further charges while you’re assembling paperwork.

Two things to keep in mind. File within 45 days of the transaction date, because that’s the window on a YouBiz card. And a S$20 handling fee may apply if our internal investigation proves a false declaration, supported by evidence from the merchant, so file claims you can substantiate.

Where a card has been lost or stolen, or is being used fraudulently, make a police report as well. A police report may be required during our investigation.

If you don’t have an account yet, our walkthrough of how to apply for a YouBiz account covers the sign-up.

What Happens After You Submit

Our team reviews the claim before it goes any further, checking it against the card network’s reason codes and the evidence you’ve supplied. Not every dispute qualifies to proceed, and you’ll hear from us either way.

Expect 9 to 12 weeks once an investigation is underway. The timeline moves with the complexity of the case and the amount in dispute, and it runs longer where the merchant contests the claim or a party to the transaction is based overseas.

Two outcomes are possible at the end of it. If the merchant accepts the chargeback, the disputed amount is credited back to your account. If the merchant contests it and produces evidence that counters your claim, the chargeback fails and the charge stands.

Tell us if the merchant settles with you while the case is open. Merchants sometimes refund directly once a dispute has been raised. If that happens, or you reach your own resolution with them, email youbiz.help@you.co so the claim doesn’t run on and credit you twice for the same transaction.

Assemble the evidence properly before you file rather than submitting early and strengthening it later. A dispute is decided on what each side can document, and a thin first submission is a common reason a legitimate claim fails.

Keeping receipts attached to transactions as they happen makes this much less painful, which is one of the things expense management software is for.

If Your Business Receives a Chargeback

Respond with evidence inside the deadline, or you forfeit by default. A merchant who ignores a chargeback notice loses the money automatically, regardless of how good their case was.

The Three Causes Behind Most Chargebacks

Chargebacks trace back to three causes, and working out which one you’re looking at tells you whether to fight the claim or fix your own process.

1. True fraud is someone using a card that isn’t theirs. The genuine cardholder disputes a charge they never made, and a chargeback is the only route they have to recover the money. This is the scenario chargebacks were created for.
   
   
2. Friendly fraud is a dispute over a purchase the customer genuinely made. The name undersells it, because the cost to you is the same as any other chargeback. Sometimes it’s honest confusion, such as a customer forgetting a subscription or not recognising your business name on their statement. Sometimes it’s deliberate, where a customer disputes a valid charge to keep the goods and get the money back.
   
   
3. Merchant error is your own mistake. Charging the wrong amount, billing twice for one order, or shipping something that doesn’t match the listing. These are the cheapest to eliminate, because the cause sits inside a process you already control.

How to Respond to a Chargeback

• Find the reason code first. The code tells you exactly what you have to prove. A non-delivery claim is defeated by delivery evidence, and a fraud claim is defeated by authentication records. Sending the wrong evidence is the same as sending none.
  
  
• Compile documentation that matches the code. Delivery confirmations with tracking, signed receipts, the customer’s order and IP records, your published refund policy, and any correspondence showing the issue was addressed.
  
  
• Decide whether contesting is worth it. On a low-value claim with weak evidence, the fee and the staff time can exceed the sale. On any claim where you can prove delivery, contest it, because your chargeback ratio matters more than the individual amount.

How to Prevent Chargebacks

• Make your business name recognisable on the customer’s statement. The text that shows up on a card statement is your billing descriptor, and when it reads as an unfamiliar holding company, customers dispute charges they actually made. That’s friendly fraud you generated yourself, and changing the descriptor fixes it once.
  
  
• Write listings that match what you ship. Most “not as described” claims come from a description that oversells rather than from a customer acting in bad faith.
  
  
• Make refunds easy to get. A customer who can get a refund from you has no reason to go to their bank, and your published refund policy doubles as evidence if you do end up at representment.
  
  
• Give customers tracking details and a way to reach you. Dispatch confirmations and a reply to a complaint stop a customer treating their bank as your customer service desk.

Where YouBiz Sits in a Merchant Dispute

YouBiz issues corporate cards and business accounts and doesn’t provide card acquiring, so incoming payments arrive by FAST, GIRO, telegraphic transfer or PayNow rather than by card.

If your business accepts card payments, the merchant side of any dispute is handled by whichever payment gateway or acquirer processes those payments, not by your business account provider. Your YouBiz account is where the money sits, not where a customer’s card dispute is decided.

How to Reduce Chargebacks on Company Cards

Most disputes on company cards trace back to a small number of causes, and controls at the card level prevent more of them than vigilance at the review stage does.

• Set merchant category restrictions on each card. Restrictions let you decide which categories a card can transact in, and a purchase outside the authorised categories is declined outright. The cardholder is notified by email and push notification when that happens, so a legitimate need surfaces quickly. Admin and Finance users can set these; Accountant and General users can view but not edit them.
  
  
• Use 3D Secure on online purchases. YouBiz cards are enabled with 3DS, which authenticates that the true cardholder is making an online payment, usually through an SMS one-time password. 3DS is the single most effective control against card-not-present fraud.
  
  
• Issue virtual cards for subscriptions. Giving each recurring vendor its own virtual card means a disputed or runaway subscription can be cut off by cancelling one card, without disrupting anything else. Cards are free to issue, so there’s no cost to being generous with them.
  
  
• Suspend accounts the day an employee leaves. Suspend a departing user’s account immediately, and don’t reassign their profile or card to someone new. Reused cards carry over billing addresses, transaction history and wallet configurations, which creates exactly the ambiguity that makes a later dispute hard to prove.
  
  
• Reconcile monthly and attach receipts as you go. A transaction with a receipt attached at the time is a transaction you can dispute months later. One without is a line item nobody can explain by the time it matters.

How Company Cards Get Compromised

Cards get compromised through theft, cloning at terminals or ATMs, merchants with weak security, details shared over email or social media, and social engineering that persuades someone to transact on a fraudster’s behalf. Most of those are addressed by the controls above rather than by spotting the charge afterwards.

For teams rolling cards out across staff for the first time, our corporate card guide for Singapore SMEs covers the setup.

FAQs

Sort Out the Deadline Before You Need It

Chargebacks are decided by paperwork and timing rather than by who’s right in principle. The company that reconciles monthly, keeps receipts attached to transactions and knows its filing window will recover money that a company reviewing quarterly has already lost the right to claim.

YouBiz gives your business a multi-currency account with free virtual and physical Mastercards, merchant category controls and 3D Secure on every card. Those controls stop a lot of disputes before the charge goes through. Cards cost nothing to issue, the account has no monthly fee, and card spend earns unlimited 1% cashback with real 0% FX fees across 150+ currencies.

Sign up at you.co/biz in under 5 minutes via Singpass. Approval lands within 1 to 2 business days, your virtual Mastercard is live in the app immediately after, and the physical card follows in 5 to 7 working days.

For the wider picture, our multi-currency business card comparison shows how the options line up, and our breakdown of how YouBiz exchange rates work explains what you pay on foreign-currency spend.