Pre-Authorisation with Actinic Payments

[johnshackleton]

We have been using Actinic payments for a few months. Generally happy with it, though we were newbies to PSP before this.

However, we have recently discovered a few issues and although I've spoken to Actinic and Natwest Streamline, I still haven't got it quite straight in my head.

Hoping someone can help.....

ISSUE 1.

All our payments both online and MOTO are set to pre-authorisation only.

Approx. 50% of our orders are stocked, a further 40% are fulfilled within 2 to 3 days. No problem taking payment there.

The problem occurs with the remaining 10% of orders that could take anything between 2 and 6 weeks to complete.

I now understand from Streamline that pre-authorisation codes are only valid for 10 days.

However, we have been committing these payments as normal within Actinic itself and a get a 'Full Payment Received' status appearing and so had no cause for concern.

We only picked the problem when reconciling our bank statement within Sage Line 50. A few payments although pre-authorised and committed successfully showed a 'Not settled / Unknown' status. We didn't have the money, and the goods had been delivered.

Not sure what we do about this scenario....


ISSUE 2.

The timing of committing a payment and when it appears on the 'bank submission' report seems confusing.

We have found if you commit a payment before 09.30am it ends up in the previous day's submission. This complicates our bank reconciliation procedures as the Invoice date and Payment date don't tie up.

Is there a daily start and finish time Credit call work too?


ISSUE 3.

What happens to a pre-authorised payment if the customer cancels the order?

We get customers complaining we have taken payment when they have cancelled or are yet to receive the goods. I guess its just because that payment is allocated to us and not available to them to draw on.

I'm mentioning this because when speaking to Streamline they scanned our account and there were quite number of old 'pre-authorised' transactions just sitting there. Can you cancel a pre-auth? I'm assuming you can only void or refund a payment if it has been committed?

Sorry this is a long message. I have other observations but will send them later.

Thanks in advance.

John

[TraceyG]

Hi John,

However, we have been committing these payments as normal within Actinic itself and a get a 'Full Payment Received' status appearing and so had no cause for concern.

Can I confirm that you mean the orders where the pre-auth codes have expired? We will need a snapshot to investigate this further, so could you upload it somewhere and email me the link to it and some examples of order numbers where this has happened please.

Is there a daily start and finish time Credit call work too?

CreditCall run bank settlement around 9:30am each day, all unsettled transactions prior to this will be in this settlement run.

We get customers complaining we have taken payment when they have cancelled or are yet to receive the goods.

Can you explain your process you go through when cancelling items/orders please.

[NicolaUK]

I now understand from Streamline that pre-authorisation codes are only valid for 10 days.

Really? I thought it was 60 days?

[johnshackleton]

Really? I thought it was 60 days?

Well, according to a supervisor at Streamline it is 10 days. I have no reason to think she got it wrong but 10 days seems quite short to me.

She checked back through our transactions for the past 3 months. There were 2 we had this problem with (pre-auth code expired but we though payment had completed). Because we were able to give them the code they manually put the payment through.

[johnshackleton]

Can you explain your process you go through when cancelling items/orders please.

I guess in reality we do nothing. The orders are transferred into Sage, if we are unable to obtain stock or the customer cancels the Sales Order in Sage is deleted.

Should we be doing anything else with the order in Actinic?

[NicolaUK]

10 days doesn't sound right to me.

If you're cancelling you should void the pre-auth, at least that's what I've been doing!

[johnshackleton]

10 days doesn't sound right to me.

Umm. Just phoned Streamline again. They are insisting its 10 days. Actinic say the number of days is set by the bank and 10 days is common, some are even 4 days.

If you're cancelling you should void the pre-auth, at least that's what I've been doing!

All confused now. In Actinic Help it says VOID's are used for;

"If you've very recently processed a payment incorrectly (i.e. that day) you can click this button to cancel it. It then won't show up on the customer's card statement."

It doesn't seems appropriate for a PRE-AUTH?

Cheers,

John

[NicolaUK]

John I have to admit you just sent me into a panic over the pre-auth length but I can confirm that, at least with TSB CardNet, it's definitely longer than 10 days. I've just checked for last month and I had transactions pre-authed on the 2nd and not committed until the 29th that have definitely settled.

I will check to see the longest length between transactions I can find as far as I'm concerned - I run a few per-orders so this is pretty crucial!

The Void thing I just assumed would be common sense, not that common sense often applies with Actinic