Introduction
Payment auto-reconciliation is an automated process in place to reduce issues experienced with uncompleted/abandoned payments. It is important to state that this is not a 100% solution to abandoned/incomplete payments and the Payment Admin screen should still be monitored, but for many customers it does provide a means to reduce the number of cases to be manually processed.
A payment is considered as fully completed when:
- customer payment card has been successfully charged
- and the customer has been redirected back to the Forms
- and the Form is updated with new submission status
Sometimes payment submissions are not being marked as successful despite customer's payment card having been charged.
These includes the following scenario:
- customer completed payment but didn't press Finish button and hence, wasn't redirected back to the Form
- customer completed payment but closed the browser tab before being redirected back to Form
- a various network errors occurred during the redirect back to the Forms
- redirect happened, however, for some reason, Form submission hasn't been updated accordingly to the payment status
As a solution of this problem, we have implemented a feature, called payments auto-reconciliation which includes changes made in both Forms and payment connectors. This is a fully automatic process which is running in background. It allows us to request payment status updates for uncompleted payments from the payment provider.
NB as of Release 424, in order to ensure that payments are not unnecessarily reconciled, payments which are not fully completed are no longer reconciled.
How does it work
This needs to be enabled on a per customer basis by request (please request via support - there is no additional charge for this functionality). Once enabled, there is an automated task running periodically on one of our dedicated servers for the customer, looking for uncompleted payments in one hour interval starting 2 hours in the past from the current date time. For any detected unfinished payment submissions, this task will request payment status from payment provider and then update Form submission based on the response received from payment provider.
As result, there is almost no need for manual processing of abandoned payments anymore.
Auto-reconciliation API for one-off reconciliation jobs
Release 418, which was deployed on April 11th 2019, introduced a new auto-reconciliation API to the platform. It allows you to run one-off reconciliation jobs automatically rather than having to complete them manually. This is to be used when there are batches of payments to be reconciled, usually due to payment connector issues. Please get in touch with Support if you would like us to run this API for you.
Further useful reading:
