Electronic Payment and Refund Transactions

Electronic Payment and Refund Transactions are payments and refunds initiated by BillMax using a third party processor. Transactions type submitted to the third party processor are:

Credit Card
Electronic Check
NACHA files

Credit card processing of course involves debit or credit of a customer's credit account whereas Electronic Check achieves the same with a customer's bank account generally through the Automated Clearing House network (ACH). A successful Credit Card payment transaction (barring a charge back) guarantees the receipt of funds at the time of the transaction. Electronic Check processing does not because of the asynchronous nature of ACH. It might take several days before a merchant knows whether the payment or refund was actually successful.

Credit Card and Electronic Check Processing Modes

BillMax processes electronic transaction either on a demand basis within the web interface or automatically as part of the nightly batch processing .

Whenever a Credit Card or Electronic Check transaction is attempted, a record of the attempt is created. These records may be viewed on an Account's Billing > Electronic Payment Activity tab.

Credit Card and Electronic Check

When BillMax submits a Credit Card or Electronic transaction request the result will be captured in BillMax as:

Approved
A Payment or Refund is entered into BillMax.
Rejected
Held
Used processing through Authorize.Net^®. Part of Authorize. Net^®’s fraud detection technology. See Resolve a Credit Card or Electronic Check Transaction Flagged as Held
Unknown
The transaction was submitted to the processor, but no valid response, if any, was received. See Resolve a Credit Card or Electronic Check Transaction Flagged as Unknown

Settled Transactions

When a transaction is submitted to a processor and it is approved, the transaction will be not be "Settled" from the processors perspective. Even though the transaction has been approved, no process has been started by the processor to transfer any funds. During this period, a transaction may be voided at the processor, the the end customer will never see the transaction on their credit card or bank statement. See Correct a non-Settled Credit Card or Electronic Check Payment.

If a transaction has been settled then either an offsetting Refund or Payment will need to be made. See Correct a Settled Credit Card or Electronic Check Payment

NACHA files

Using NACHA files operates on the premise that the approval or rejection of a transaction will take place sometime in the future relative to booking a Payment in BillMax for the customer. Therefore, if BillMax is setup for NACHA processing and an Electronic Check transaction is created for a customer the following happens:

A Payment or Refund is entered into BillMax for the Account. The Payment or Refund is approved by definition.
A record is entered into the NACHA file for future upload.

Transactions in a NACHA file that are subsequently rejected will have to go through the Reversal process. See Book a Payment Reversal.