Administration, Core Financials, and Project Accounting

[intelcpuhead]

Coming from MAS200 I must say we are at a total loss on how the credit card processing is designed to function in 500.

Here is our standard order process:

* Sales rep enters an order and pre-auth’s the card for the order amount.
* Shipping picks, ships and generates a proforma invoice.   
* Office commits the shipments, creates an invoice batch. 

In their batch the pre-auth’s are applied to the invoice minus the freight. How do we combine the freight? There is no option to post auth at a higher amount..

As far as I understand we are supposed to:

(A) Guess the freight and bill out customers that amount

(B) Create a second payment/ transaction for the remain amount in the invoice.

[rsisk101]

There are a couple of ways to handle Freight on the sales order...

1. When creating the pre-auth payment for the order, estimate the freight and add it to the pre-auth amount. When the order is shipped and committed, only the amount invoiced will be captured from the credit card up to the amount of the pre-auth.

2. Edit the shipment and pre-auth the actual amount of freight. The funds will be captured during shipment commit.

The ship commit process considers the total amount of the invoice, including freight, taxes, and discounts, when determining how much of the pre-auths associated with the orders on the shipment to capture. And it will capture and apply as much of the payments available until the invoice is fully paid, or there are no more payments to capture/apply.

What it will not do is captuer more than the amount pre-authed. The reason for this is how do you determine how much is OK to capture beyond the pre-auth? What if the order is for $100, the customer wants to put $10 on the card and be billed the rest. Should  the ship commit try to capture the full $100? I'm sure there would be unhappy customers if the ship commit was implemented that way. The approach used was to assume the amount pre-authed was the maximum amount authorized to be charged on the credit card.

Another reason for not capturing more than what was pre-authed is not all credit card proecessors allow the captured amount to be greater than the pre-authed amount.

[SueF]

I understand the thinking on only allowing the charge to be for what the preauth was for, but this approach has created major problems for our company.  We very seldom ship what was ordered, due to overrun quantities.  Although we estimate high on overage and freight, we are now creating a second charge at the invoice stage for a few bucks.  It's confusing to the customer to have extra charges on their statement and creating extra steps for us.  Almost every time we do this in invoicing, we are getting an address error, even though minutes before, we used the same card with the same address. 

The invoice does not reflect the two payments in the total.  I verified the invoice form that's standard with MAS 500 and it's not subtracting the first charge that was done at shipping, so the customer is not getting an invoice with a zero balance.

Is there a possibility that allowing additional charges over what the preauth was for will be an option in a future release? 

[KLou]

We are in a similar situation where we have to hopefully overestimate the freight charges.  Often times, the pre-auth is slightly undereestimated and leaves a few dollars left on the invoice - which is obviously  extra paperwork for the accounting department.

In our case (we also use Starship, so Freight=PACKAGING), would it be possible to display the amount pre-authed as "Freight" in the CC module then be reflected as Order Freight at the shipment level?  Then at least we can stop the shipment at the warehouse level before it gets sent out.

As with the OP, we also split the workflow of shipping and committing shipments between the warehouse and office.  I understand that it IS possible to change the payment information and amounts at the shipment level, but for various reasons (PCI being one of them), I'd like to keep CC transactions and access limited as much as possible.  And in many cases, by the time the shipment is committed, the physical package is already picked up and sent out.

[bunker72070]

I am just curious if anyone has found a solution to this problem.  To reiterate the issue, we preauthorize at Sales Order, Pick and Pack the order in the warehouse - freight is determined via Star Ship freight method = Packaging and then invoice and capture the funds for merchandise + freight. 

I am curious how people are working around this.  The steps listed and options given by Sage are completely unreasonable.  The PSG version of credit card we were running handled these transactions so I can't figure out why they would have changed the process. 

Every solution I have found only confuses the customer and creates inefficiencies.  Like I said, I am curious if there is an enchancement offered by a 3rd party or if someone has come up with a reasonable workaround. 

[Russ]

Regarding your inquiry about any 3rd parties that might have a solution, e2b is currently in the process of creating a feature within the shipment commit process to override to the amount used when capturing funds.  During the shipment commit the credit card payment will be updated to match the total shipment amount, including the billed freight from the shipment, even if it is greater than the original pre-authorization amount.

In addition to this enhancement, e2b has also created other features that enhance the MAS 500 Credit Card functionality:

1)  Ability to save credit card information on a sales order without completing a pre-authorization.

2)  Ability to do a "bulk" pre-authorization of a group of sales orders based on selection criteria such as scheduled ship date.  This is particularly useful for customers who take orders that have scheduled ship dates father out than the standard pre-authorization expiration window (7 days).

3)  An API that can save new credit card information within MAS 500 and return the Vault GUID.  (This has been used by a customer that is accepting orders on a web site and needs the ability to hand off the credit card information to MAS 500.)

4)  Ability to import credit card information as part of the Sales Order Data Import task (within the DI module).

If any of the above would help you, please contact me to discuss.

[TRoop]

I am curious as to what version everyone experiencing this is on here?  

Is this all within Mas 500 7.3?

[oyama]

I believe it has to be within MAS500 7.3 because 7.2 did not have Sage credit card module. And 7.4 is not out yet...

[Russ]

Yes, this all related to MAS 500 7.3.

[TRoop]

Just curious because we are actually using the PSG addon for 7.2...