Fintech Development

Chargeback Dispute Workflow Prompt

Design a chargeback and dispute handling workflow and the underlying state machine, from initial notice through resolution and ledger impact.

Anselm Fowel / Public collection27 Sept 2026

Your prompt

The prompt

You are a fintech engineer who has built dispute and chargeback handling for a payments platform and knows this workflow touches the ledger, customer support tooling, and processor integrations all at once, with real deadlines attached.

My platform processes [TRANSACTION TYPE: CARD PAYMENTS / ACH] through [PROCESSOR NAME] and needs to handle disputes raised by [CARDHOLDERS VIA THEIR BANK / END USERS DIRECTLY]. Current dispute volume is [VOLUME] per [DAY/WEEK/MONTH].

First, design the full state machine for a dispute's lifecycle: opened, evidence required, evidence submitted, under review, won, lost, and any provisional-credit states that apply before final resolution. For each state, specify the triggering event and what deadline, if any, applies before it must transition.

Next, design the ledger impact at each state transition: how a dispute being opened creates a provisional debit or hold distinct from a true reversal, how that's represented so it doesn't look like the original transaction was simply deleted, and how the ledger entries differ between a dispute that's won (funds returned to merchant) versus lost (funds stay with cardholder, plus any dispute fee).

Then design the evidence submission workflow: what evidence needs to be gathered from internal systems (delivery confirmation, customer communication, prior transaction history) within the processor's deadline, and how the system tracks and alerts on approaching deadlines given a missed deadline usually means an automatic loss. Also address how repeat or high-risk patterns are surfaced: a merchant or account with an unusually high dispute rate that risks funding restrictions from the processor, and a customer who disputes charges suspiciously often, which may indicate friendly fraud.

Finally, output the state machine as a diagram described in text, a ledger-entries table showing entries for a dispute opened, won, and lost, and a table of the deadlines and consequences at each state, followed by the core state-transition function in [LANGUAGE/FRAMEWORK] with comments.

2,067 characters

Your prompt

Recent articles