​My business partner and I are disagreeing about whether to refund a customer. I’d love your advice.

I am a florist, and I have co-owned a small business for about a year. My business partner (who mostly handles customer service) and I (I mostly handle the floristry itself) generally agree on our business practices, but the one thing we’ve disagreed on a few times is refund policies. We do a lot of large orders for events (weddings, funerals, etc.), and my business partner generally takes orders from clients who request specific flowers, colors, and so on, and then she write up a very clear invoice with their final order explained plus the price. My business partner communicates with our customers regularly throughout their process of making requests and choosing flowers, so that at the time of signing the invoice and paying for our services, there’s a very clear written agreement that codifies their order. Then, I receive the paid invoice and create the flower arrangements according to the written order on it.

Early on, my business partner felt very strongly that we shouldn’t offer refunds on completed orders. I felt a bit uneasy about being so rigid, but I was ultimately persuaded to put such a policy into our written terms and conditions, and my partner in turn agreed that we would be flexible in certain case-by-case situations.

Well, we’ve been running our business for a year, and we just got our first refund request, and my business partner and I can’t agree on how to handle it. Here’s what happened:

A mother was charged with buying flower arrangements for her daughter’s wedding. It was a huge order. She sent in her requests via email, and she went back and forth with my business partner a bit before receiving approval via email for what she had requested. My business partner then made a big mistake in writing up this customer’s invoice. She mixed up multiple colors and flowers compared to what had originally been agreed upon over email, and this error ultimately caused huge differences between the order written on the invoice and the order that the customer originally placed via email. There was no pricing issue — the final order cost the same as the original quote — but there were major errors in the content of the order. And unfortunately, the customer paid the invoice (which has the “no refunds” term below), without alerting us to the discrepancy between the final invoice and the order she placed over email. Once the invoice was paid, I received the order that had been listed on the invoice, and I fulfilled it, having no clue that it differed from what the customer originally agreed on with my partner in emails.

Today, the customer (the bride’s mother) wrote to us, devastated, to request a refund, citing the discrepancy between her original emails and the order her daughter received. I think the customer is right for asking for a refund here, and this is an instance where we should be flexible on our refund policy. While it’s true that the mother misread (or didn’t read) the invoice, it’s also true that my business partner made big mistakes and misread the customer’s original email. So, I think the bigger error falls on us. My business partner, however, believes that the mother fully approved the order as written on the invoice by paying the invoice, even though the order on the invoice was different from the informal agreement made via email. So my partner argues that we don’t need to refund her because she had the opportunity to say she wanted something different from what was clearly written on the invoice, yet she paid the invoice instead, and that was the final order.

Now, I have ideas for how to prevent this from happening again with future customers. Moving forward, I’ll review not only the invoice but also the trail of emails between my business partner and customers before fulfilling orders, for instance. However, with this customer, what would you do? My business partner and I really disagree, despite our usual ease of working together, and I can’t tell if I’m crazy. Thanks for your thoughts!