When Will My Card Payment Show Up in Stripe?
Once you've connected your Zenamu account to Stripe and started receiving card payments from your clients, you can view a detailed overview of these payments in the Payments section of your Stripe dashboard. For example:
Stripe automatically sends funds to your bank account once a week (unless you've chosen a different schedule) as a single combined transfer.
Stripe Payment Statuses
In your payment summary, you may encounter the following statuses:
Succeeded: The payment was successfully completed. The amount was debited from the client's bank account and is now credited to your total Stripe account balance.
Incomplete: No payment has been made. The client has not entered their credit card details or completed the transaction.
Failed: The payment was declined by the card issuer (the bank).
Uncaptured: The payment went through, but the amount hasn't been debited from the client's bank account -- it's only "held." It's not yet credited to your Stripe balance. Don't worry -- Zenamu does this to save you money and avoid unnecessary fees (see next section). The amount will be reflected in your balance within a few days.
Canceled: The payment was canceled by you.
Refunded: The payment was canceled by the client and refunded.
How Zenamu Prevents Unnecessary Fees from Canceled Bookings
Zenamu can potentially save you money on canceled bookings. When a payment is created for a class or course, we instruct Stripe to hold the funds on the client's bank account rather than immediately debiting them. If the amount were debited right away, Stripe would charge a transaction fee. And if the client then cancels, you'd have to cover the difference of that fee yourself.
The client would get a full refund for a timely cancellation, but you'd be left paying the transaction fee out of pocket. If the payment is only held (status Uncaptured), there are no fees if the booking is canceled.
We release and capture funds automatically:
For payments made less than a week before the class: The payment is captured just before the class starts.
For payments made more than a week before the class: The payment is captured about 6 days after payment, as long as the class is 7 or more days away. Funds can only be held on a bank account for up to 7 days -- if they're not released, the bank will cancel the payment.
Once captured, the payment status in Stripe will update to Succeeded.
Why Is the Process Complex?
We chose this slightly more complex approach with the "uncaptured" state and 7-day window to save you cancellation fees on Stripe.
This also helps prevent potential fraud from clients who might repeatedly place and cancel orders, where each cancellation would cost you a transaction fee.
We understand this process can be confusing at first. We recommend testing it with a small amount to see how it works in practice.
How Canceled and Refunded Payments Are Displayed in Stripe
Uncaptured -> Canceled: Payment from the uncaptured state canceled by you as the studio owner:
Captured -> Refunded: Payment from the captured state canceled by the client:
My Client Says the Refund Never Arrived — What Do I Tell Them?
If Zenamu shows the order as refunded but the client claims they never got the money back, the order was almost certainly canceled while the payment was still in the uncaptured state (the money was only held on the card, never actually charged).
Why it looks confusing to the client: The hold appears as a pending charge in their banking app. When the hold is released, the pending charge simply disappears — banks do not show a separate "refund" entry, because no money ever moved. From the client's perspective, it looks as if they paid and the money vanished.
What actually happened — two scenarios:
Original payment state | What the client sees in their bank |
Uncaptured (only held, never charged) | The pending charge disappears within 5–7 days. No refund line. |
Captured (actually charged) | A refund is sent back to the original card. Usually arrives in 5–10 business days. |
Template message you can send to the client:
"Your booking was canceled. The payment was only held on your card at the time of cancellation, not actually charged. Your bank releases this hold automatically — usually within a few days. In your banking app you won't see a 'refund' entry, you'll just see the pending charge disappear, as if the payment had never gone through."
If the client confirms the charge is fully gone (no longer pending in their bank), there is nothing further to do — they were never charged in the first place.