Your dashboard books a sale the day it clears, but net revenue after refunds is the only figure your ad budget should trust

Booked revenue and kept revenue are two different numbers. The gap between them is every refund and chargeback that reverses after the sale already looked final, and it is wider than most dashboards admit.

Your dashboard books a sale the moment it clears. The refund can arrive days later, the chargeback can arrive months later, and by then you have already reported the revenue, counted it toward a cohort, and in most cases spent against it to buy the next user. Net revenue after refunds is the figure that survives all of that, and it is the only one your acquisition budget should trust.

Here is where the gap comes from, what it does to the numbers you run the business on, and what it costs in real money once you stop counting the sales you had to give back.

What net revenue after refunds actually means

Net revenue after refunds is a plain idea that dashboards make easy to forget. It is the money you booked minus the money you had to give back, after the store settles its cut. A sale is recorded the instant it clears. A refund or a chargeback is recorded whenever it happens, which is later, sometimes much later. The two events land in different reporting periods, so the sale looks like clean revenue right up until the reversal quietly appears in a future statement.

A sale is counted once, and reversed on its own schedule

On Google Play a buyer can self-serve a refund for 48 hours after purchase, once per app. Apple decides refund requests case by case, usually within a day or two. A card chargeback runs on the bank's calendar, commonly 120 days from the transaction and up to 540 in certain fraud and future-delivery cases. That spread is the whole problem. The sale hits your dashboard now, and the reversal can hit any time from tomorrow to next year.

Gross bookings are not what you keep

Gross bookings are what customers paid. Net revenue after refunds is what stays in your account once the reversals clear and the store takes its cut. Both Apple and Google return their commission when a purchase is refunded, so a refund pulls back your net, not the gross. That is a relief on a plain refund and a trap in your metrics, because if your revenue number still carries the gross of a sale that was later refunded, you are reporting money that already left.

How refunds quietly inflate the numbers you run the business on

They overstate revenue and MRR

Every refund you have not subtracted is revenue you do not have, sitting inside a number you are treating as real. At a 3 to 5 percent refund rate, a few points of your reported revenue is money already promised back. On subscriptions it also props up MRR, because a subscriber who refunded and churned can still read as active revenue until the reversal is reconciled.

They inflate LTV, so you overpay for users

This is where the accounting mistake turns into a spending mistake. Lifetime value built on gross bookings counts refunded sales as lifetime value. Adapty's benchmarking is blunt about it. Failing to account for a 3 to 5 percent refund rate significantly overstates the return on acquisition campaigns. If your LTV runs a few points high, your allowable cost per install runs a few points high, and you bid up to buy users against revenue that reverses. You are paying real ad dollars to chase a number that was never yours to keep.

They corrupt attribution and cohort data

Refunds also break the link between a sale and the campaign that produced it. AppsFlyer puts unhandled refunds among the pitfalls that reduce in-app purchase data accuracy, and estimates refunds alone can cut accuracy by 5 to 10 percent. The fix is tedious. Match each refund back to the original receipt and subtract it from the campaign and cohort that got credit for the sale. Skip that, and your best-performing channel on paper may just be the one with the highest refund rate.

What the gap costs you in money

Precision in the metrics matters because the gap is not academic. It is cash.

A refund costs you your net plus the service you already spent

On a plain refund the money side is bounded. Apple and Google reverse their commission, so on a refunded 100 dollar sale you give back roughly the 70 dollars you were paid, not 100. What does not come back is the cost of serving that customer. The compute you ran, the API calls you paid for, the storage you held, and any payout already booked are spent. A refund reverses the payment, not the work.

A chargeback costs more, and on Google Play it now costs you directly

A chargeback is the expensive reversal, and the bill moved. For orders placed on or after August 3, 2026, Google Play charges the developer the purchase price less Play's service fee, plus the bank's chargeback fee. Payment-industry sources put that bank fee around 15 to 25 dollars per dispute. On a 19.99 dollar sale, a lost chargeback reverses the roughly 17 dollars you netted and adds 15 to 25 dollars on top, so a single dispute can cost more than double the sale. On the App Store, Apple is the merchant of record and resolves card disputes itself, so it does not pass you the bank's fee.

The bill arrives after you have already spent the revenue

The timing is what makes it sting. You booked the sale, counted it in a cohort, and spent against it to buy the next user. The refund lands days later and the chargeback can land months later, on Google Play commonly up to 120 days and sometimes far longer. By the time the reversal hits, the revenue is already deployed. You are not trimming a forecast, you are covering a shortfall in cash you already committed.

How to run on net revenue after refunds

Subtract reversals at the cohort level, not just the top line

A company-wide refund percentage is not enough, because refunds are not spread evenly. Education and hard-paywall apps refund far more than travel or shopping. Subtract refunds and chargebacks inside each cohort and each campaign, so the channel you scale is the one with the best net, not the best gross.

Hold the sale open until the windows close

Do not treat a sale as final revenue the day it clears. Keep it provisional through the refund window and, for money you plan to spend against, through the chargeback window. A 48-hour Play refund and a 120-day card dispute are two different risk horizons on the same sale.

Answer the two windows where your evidence counts

You cannot stop most reversals, but two of them ask for your side, and answering protects real revenue. Apple sends your server a CONSUMPTION_REQUEST and gives you 12 hours to respond through Send Consumption Information V2. Google Play opens a 24-hour chargeback review through orders.reviewrefund. Everything else, the 48-hour Play refund, support refunds, voided purchases, is decided without you and can only be recorded. Miss the two windows that do take input, and you lose revenue you could have kept.

Reconcile late, because the number keeps moving

The revenue for a given month is not final at month end. A payout that looked clean can be reduced by a chargeback weeks or months later. Reconcile refunds and disputes back to the original orders on a rolling basis, so your net revenue after refunds settles to the truth instead of drifting.

This is the number RefundHalt is built to keep honest. Refunds and chargebacks are matched back to the sale and the cohort they reverse, the 24-hour Google review and the 12-hour Apple consumption request surface with their clocks so you can answer the ones that take input, and a dispute that arrives months later lands against the right sale instead of a mystery deduction in a later payout.

The short version

Your dashboard shows a sale the day it clears. Net revenue after refunds shows what you actually kept after every reversal, and it is always the smaller number. Refunds run 2 to 5 percent of paid transactions and more in some categories, they reverse your net rather than the gross, and a chargeback on Google Play now costs you the purchase price less the service fee plus a 15 to 25 dollar bank fee on top. All of it arrives after you booked the revenue and often after you spent it. Build your LTV and your ad budget on net, answer the two windows that take your evidence, and reconcile late, because a sale is not yours to keep until the customer can no longer take it back.