Troubleshoot Transaction Capture Issues

This article will cover what to do when an authorization occurs with no capture.

The biggest change that happens with the Auth/Capture process is that you may see transactions that are pending within your gateway’s customer portal. These usually occur due to an error or communication failure, and it is important to know that while these transactions will not finalize processing on their own, they will be visible on the cardholder’s online banking for a time afterward before dropping off unless you release the authorization hold.

It is highly recommended that your staff review your processing accounts for these pending transactions and determine what steps you wish to take to resolve these, as this can affect a cardholder’s available balance. A few steps that we recommend include:

• Check the cart log and try to determine what your customer attempted to purchase. 
• Check your customer's account record to see if they made the same payment. 
• Contact the customers and verify that they still want to make the purchase. 
• From there you should have enough information to know if you want to capture the transaction or release the hold. If you wish to capture the transaction, proceed to the steps below. 

Important Note

• While most gateways tend to keep a transaction pending for 3 to 5 days, we’ve found that Authorize.Net has this time set to 30 days. This is not a setting we can modify.

Instructions After Capturing the Funds 

1. Capture the funds in your gateway
2. Purchase the item in Recreation Management as cash 
   
   • Be sure to back-date the Receipt to the day you capture the funds
3. Submit a support ticket with the following information 
   • Receipt number 
   • Actual payment type (for example credit or debit) 
   • Merchant code from the gateway 
   • you may wish to include SAME DAY NEEDED in the summary of the ticket to ensure support knows to take quick action. 
4. Once submitted, support will regenerate the receipt and associate it with the correct payment from your gateway. 
   Note: The credit card transactions you manually create receipts for cannot be refunded from the Recreation Management User interface. The transaction will need to be refunded through your gateway provider. To have a receipt appear as refunded in Rec reach out to Support.

Auto-Void for Elavon 

Currently, there is an incompatibility with voiding an authorized (but not captured) transaction, and there is a possibility that you will encounter some errors in the Auto-Void report depending on why the Auto-Void process was triggered.

Currently, the only option available would be to automatically delete the hold, but at that point, you would have no opportunity to collect the funds. We are working to provide a stronger solution for this additional complication, but after intensive testing, it’s been found that there are fewer errors with transactions overall.