Payment processing

Merchant account

Merchant accounts are used to process credit card or eCheck payments. Each merchant account uses a specified payment gateway to send payment information to the bank or financial institution that will process the transaction, and to notify Infor Public Sector whether the payment was successful. You can set up separate merchant accounts for credit card payments and for eCheck payments. For eCheck payments, customers enter their routing number and account number to take the payment directly from their checking account.

Payment gateway

A payment gateway passes transaction information between your agency and a merchant account provider. Infor Public Sector supports these payment gateways:

• PayFlowPro: Preconfigured payment gateway provider.
• FormulaBased: Each gateway must perform two basic functions: authorizing payments and reversing payments. With a formula-based gateway, you enter your own authorize payment and reverse payment formulas.
• Web Form: Generic solution. You can define your own web form to take payment information.

  See Web form payment gateways.

• PX Fusion: Preconfigured payment gateway provider.
• Hosted Page: Generic solution. You can redirect the customer to an external site, where payment information is taken.

  See Hosted page payment gateways.

• Elavon: Used to take payments in Infor Rhythm for Civics. See the Infor Rhythm for Civics Administration Guide.

Payment authorization

When a payment requires authorization, Infor Public Sector first creates a PaymentServerTransaction record and sets the TransactionStatus to Pending. The payment information is then sent to the merchant account associated with the tender type. The TransactionNumber property of the DrawerTransaction object is used to identify the payment, because the drawer transaction is the payment record.

The card number is kept in memory temporarily, but is not committed to the database. The memory is cleared when the transaction is complete, so no sensitive data is kept in the agency's system.

Infor Public Sector sends the authorization request to the payment gateway for the merchant account, and receives a response of Approved, Declined, or Failed. The status of the payment server transaction is updated with this response.

If the status is Approved, the funds are distributed and the transaction is complete.

If the status is Declined, the drawer transaction is reversed. Either an alternate form of payment must be provided or the register transaction is voided.

A Failed status indicates that the authorization request could not be completed. The authorization request might also time out, leaving the status as Pending. In either case the options are to void the register transaction and try again, or to alter the payment server transaction with the appropriate response data.