Reauthorizing a Credit Card upon Shipment

You can avoid reserving funds against the customer's card too early, but still ensure that the customer has the necessary funds before you ship the product. To do this, run a pre-authorization of 0 dollars (or whatever currency is being used) during order entry. Then use the Credit Card Shipping Authorization Utility to perform another authorization for the full amount of the order just before you ship the product.

Note: This utility is intended to be run after the order has shipped in SyteLine but before the product is physically shipped from the building.

In the Credit Card Shipping Authorization Utility, specify criteria that the utility uses to select the transactions to process:

Order

Specify the starting and ending customer order numbers to reauthorize.

Date Shipped

Specify the date range of shipped orders to reauthorize.

Ship Via

Specify a shipping carrier, or a range of carriers, to limit the reauthorization only to orders handled by that carrier, or range of carriers. This is useful if you want to run the utility multiple times based on when a certain shipper is due to arrive each day.
Select a report generation option:
- Always: Show all processed transactions regardless of success or failure.
- On Error: Show transactions only when an error occurs during processing. This is useful if you run the utility in the background and only want to be notified when a problem occurs.
- Never: Never show transactions. This is useful if you already monitor transactions through the Credit Card Transactions form or some other data analysis.
Click Process. The report output displays the credit card transaction details. The reference pointer to the third-party credit card processing application is displayed in place of the actual credit card number.

Note:

You can run this utility on the background queue so that it processes during off-business hours or periodically throughout the day. The Background Task Definition for this report is SSSCCIShippingAuthorizationReport.
Depending on the way that the user's credit card processor handles voids and authorizations, using the Credit Card Shipping Authorization Utility to reauthorize a credit card could cause extra charges to the customer's account. Reauthorization is intended to reduce the number of transactions by checking to see if a previous authorization for the same amount has already been done for the shipment, but if you run the utility multiple times, it could cause multiple transactions, which in turn could cause multiple transaction fees.
You could possibly "double reserve" a customer's credit card if you preauthorize the full amount during order entry and then authorize again during the shipment process. The intended process when using the Shipping Authorization method is to only authorize a small amount (0 or 1 dollar) during order entry and then specify the full amount at time of shipping. However, the solution allows users to authorize full amounts in both places, to support transactions with a longer lead time where the preauthorization might expire.
If you change the credit card system for a transaction after authorization is done but before the invoice is posted to charge the customer's card, any reauthorizations must be posted using the original gateway token. The original credit card system is stored with the transaction to ensure that this occurs.