Industry Processing Terms

Credit/Debit Card Transactions

Sale

A sale is the basic function that allows merchants to charge a customer's card for goods or services. It is a single step process for collecting funds directly.

Authorization

An authorization verifies that a card holder has appropriate funds available to complete a transaction. This action does not collect funds from the card holder but rather "holds" the funds in the account for later collection or release.

Capture

A capture transaction can be submitted against a successful authorization for equal or less value than the original authorization transaction.

Void

A void can be performed on an authorization prior to and instead of a capture. This removes the authorization's validity and renders it unavailable for capture.

Refund

A refund can be issued against either a sale or capture transaction. This function returns funds to the card holder for equal or less value than the original sale/capture transaction.

Recurring

A recurring sale can be issued against either a previously successful sale transaction or an entirely new transaction. This function runs a cloned transaction of the original on a repeating schedule set by you.

ACH Transactions

Credit

A credit transaction is when you add funds to an account. ACH credit transactions are most often used for direct deposit payroll transactions, P2P payments, and refunds. (This is the same function as a refund on a credit card)

Debit

An ACH Debit transaction is when you take funds from an account. (This is the same function as a sale transaction on a credit card)

Chargeback

A chargeback is an amount an ACH merchant pays to a customer after the customer successfully disputes an item on their bank account statement. (It is the same as a chargeback in a credit card transaction)

Void

An ACH void is the same as a void in card processing after the authorization but before the capture. A void transaction can only occur prior to the ACH batch processing cut off time.

NSF

NSF means ‘Non-Sufficient Funds’. NSF occurs when there are not enough funds in a user's bank account to cover a payment or transaction. It is the same as a credit card decline if the customer doesn’t have enough funds in their card account to pay for the transaction.

Payment Tokenization Service

This allows you to obtain Card / ACH Tokens for replacing stored credit card or account numbers with PCI compliant tokens without processing a transaction against the card or account. One transaction is handled per request.

Customer Vault Operations

If you want to use the Customer Vault, then you must use the ‘Payment Sale’ API call and when creating a new transaction, make sure you include all the appropriate customer details in the API call - so that all customer information is available in the gateway as a payment CRM.

Including this detail can be helpful if you need to manually set up a recurring transaction for the customer within your browser while logged into the gateway.