Recurring Transaction Issue

[dannywynne]

I have posted an email below from my boss to the sales department. I think it will be obvious to see her frustration. Hopefully we can hammer out a solution.

We are currently using a custom form using the API to post donations. One of these forms allows the customer to set up a recurring donation, and that part has been working fine. The data is coming across, the system sees it is a recurring donation, and all seemed well. However, now that we are coming up on the first execution of the actual recurrence, there is an issue. The orders being sent to Transaction Central do NOT include the recurring data. We would have to manually make that happen.

Is there some additional piece of data that we need to include with the data transmission? Is this a limitation of the API?

For your refrence, our account number is 25991. The WID is 69236 for the form that is referenced below.

Thanks for your assistance,
Danny Wynne


When I signed up for Click and Plege the saes representative said it could do recurring transactions. We used API to set up custom pages for donations including recuring. After that I noticed on Transaction Central that the recurring did not come over, it was set as manual. Transaction Central sent it up their chain to see why it did not transfer over and I have attached their response. Given this, I manually set up the recurring on the Transaction Central side, which will then ALWAYS create a discrepancy between the two. This is not acceptible.

Today was the first day of the next recurring payment. There were 5 scheduled today. I got an email from CP that the payment will not go through and that I am going to continue to receive the email until I cancel the transaction. I checked my credit card, however, and the transaction went through. When I ran the report on the CP site, it only shows my transaction so hopefully I am the only one receiving this email and not my donors. I am afraid to cancel as it might then flow to Transaction Central and cancel the recurring transaction.

I have spent over $4,000 on this transfer to CP and am so FRUSTRATED. I work with over 12 charities and that number is growing. I was hoping to be able to share CP with them and suggest they use it. After all of these issues, I am thinking of leaving CP and telling all of them not to use CP. Lastly, the sales representative raived about the support without mentioning that you have to pay to speakk to anyone.

I need the integration issues resolved as soon as possilbe and need to know how to clear the transaction on CP without it affecting the Transaction Central.

[CnP.Support]

Good day @Dannywynne:

Why have you used Transaction Central for recurring? Anytime we setup TC for clients we specifically state that DO NOT use anything from TC other than reporting. Who has given you access to TC?

Transfirst's site is for Transfirst only and they are NOT connected to Click & Pledge. Click & Pledge posts to Transfirst and not vice-versa.

Our API handles recurring and all of our clients use recurring on a daily basis. You should never use TC since it is a different world and not related to us by any means. Yes you will get the money but we have no knowledge of what you have done there.

All your activities have to be done in Click & Pledge or Salesforce which connects to the API.

I hope this clarifies the issue. We cannot possibly have any knowledge of your activities in TC and we have instructed Transfirst not to give access to our clients to that platform for this very reason. How did you get access to TC?

[dannywynne]

Here is the reponse from my company president -

After I signed up for Click and Pledge I received an email that said two merchant applications would be emailed and I needed to sign them, one was for my swiper and one for the computer. The email mentioned TransFirst. After the applications I received notice that my Click and Pledge account was active. Shortly after than I received a letter in the mail from TransFirst that says, "Congratulations! Your TransAction Central account is active and ready for use!" The letter proceeded to tell me how to logon and set up my user name and password. So, I did that. A week or so later I had emails about PCI compliance that I needed to complete annually. I had to call the phone number for TransFirst Merchant Services to complete the form. They told me how to use the Transaction Central site. So, when I was checking that everything came over correctly for the recurring I noticed that it did not as it came over as manual. They never said I should not be on TransAction Central if I am with Click and Pledge.


I have paid my programmer for hours spent on this issue. How can this be resolved and quickly? I have many donors that have signed up for recurring through my website - the next person signed up on the 19th, then 20th , 22nd and so on. I need someone to walk me through how to resolve this as soon as possible. Given that the error was from TransFirst I do not believe I should have to pay for this help especially since it has already cost me hundreds of dollars and time. Let me know if you need additional information to help me. Thank you.

[CnP.Support]

Good day @dannywynne:

We have contacted Transfirst and are working to resolve the issue and our support department will email you when they have solved the mix-up. I would like to explain a few things so it helps you out in the future.

1. Support: Click & Pledge has 2 types of support. Our free support provides email & forum support 20 hours a day 6 days a week. It is free and done purely on email. We have over 10K clients worldwide and this method of support works great. 99.99% of all issues are resolved by 2 emails. If needed support engineers will arrange for a call and will contact the client to resolve an issue that cannot be resolved by email. It is always best to email us with as much detail as possible with the name and account number of your organization so we can save time and not go back and forth asking for them. Our premiere support is a fee based support where our premium support engineers will call you in 2 hours and resolve issues on the phone. Details of our support plans are provided on our site: http://clickandpledge.com/support/
2. Recurring transactions: Click & Pledge runs and processes recurring transactions through our own forms. Every form has a recurring option which may be enabled. The API also has recurring nodes which need to be set up in the form and can be used easily. Here is an example for a form that has recurring: https://co.clickandpledge.com/?wid=55908 and example of a recurring form using our API: https://www.clickandpledge.com/Platf.../example/000r/ - so your developer should add the recurring nodes directly in the program. Here is the link to the FaaS API recurring node: http://manual.clickandpledge.com/For...g_Transactions
3. Transfirst Transaction Central: Transfirst is the gateway that we use for all of our US merchants. We have notified them of this mistake and they are changing their mail that they send to our clients. Click & Pledge has extensive integration with Salesforce and other 3rd party applications and as such has to manage the entire payment flow through its own system. With recurring transactions we set up a recurring vault with Transfirst but will NOT run recurrings through Transfirst. If we were to have Transfirst, or other gateways that we work with, run the recurring we would never know when those recurrings have run. Salesforce, receipts, notifications, updates will never happen since gateways don't post information back to us. Our proprietor engine running the recurring will run the transaction in Transfirst and update all records internally. Using this feature also allows our clients in Salesforce to run transactions from inside Salesforce without asking for the credit card information if the patron has already made a transaction. You may see this feature at: http://forums.clickandpledge.com/con...-in-Salesforce
4. Your issue: The issue you have created is due to the error made in setting up the recurring. It appears that the patron was set up in Click & Pledge and later was also set up in Transfirst. If any transaction is processed through the Transaction Central we will have no knowledge of it. Our reports will not reflect that transaction and for all practical purposes, as far as Click & Pledge is concerned, that transaction has never happened. Transfirst (or the gateway) will process and settle it directly. You should never process anything with the Transaction Central. We are actually surprised that you are given access to that portal since all gateways are instructed to block clients from accessing their transaction engine. We offer limited access to the reporting services of gateways, e.g. Transfirst, to our clients only when they wish to know more details about daily batches- information that the gateways don't typically send out to us.

I know that support has been working with Transfirst to cancel out your duplicated recurrings and they will get back to you once they have it all cleared. We have retrieved all your calls with Transfirst and are addressing the issue with their support engineers ensuring this does not happen again.

Please let us know if we can answer any other questions you may have.

[dannywynne]

I wanted to circle back on how things were going with Transfirst. While we did get some phone calls from support to get additional information, we have not received word that the data issues have been corrected. The next batch of recurring payments is slated to go through this week, so I guess we will find out if the changes were made. Please let us know your expectation as to whether the duplicate recurrings and such are corrected.

[CnP.Support]

Good day @DannyWynne:

If you have done the recurring transactions in Transfirst, which you have done, we have no control over them. Transfirst will run them and we will have absolutely no knowledge of them, those transactions will NOT post to us and they will not post to Salesforce, needless to say that we don't send any receipts. We CANNOT cancel those recurrings since don't have access to your account.

Please login to your Transfirst account and cancel those recurrings and set them up again in Click & Pledge.

As stated before we have no idea who you were given access to that account since we don't let any client have access to direct Transfirst accounts for this very reason. Please note that we are not integrated with their API and they are not integrated with us. We post to them but they don't post to us.

Our support department will email you and let you know that you have to cancel those transactions directly with Transfirst since we can't do that for you- we don't have access to your account as stated earlier. I strongly urge you to stop logging into Transfirst and with your permission we will ask that your access be removed to Transfirst's virtual terminal and recurring options.

Let us know if we can answer any questions you may have.

[CnP.Support]

Good day!

Our support has tried contacting you several times. This morning they have tried again and have left a message for Marion R*** @ *****-9089

We want to make sure that you are aware of our lack of control over what you have done with the Transaction Central @ Transfirst. Transfirst cannot cancel those transactions since you need to login and cancel them yourself at Transfirst. If those transactions are set up for automatic recurring at Transfirst's Translink website they will run and we have no way of stopping it.

Our repeated attempts to reach you have failed so please reply to our support emails and resolve this issue as soon as possible.

All recurring and transactions have to be done at the Click & Pledge portal or through the Virtual Terminal in Salesforce. Our support has spent a long time trying to figure out what has happened at Transfirst. Transfirst's records shows the following file:



The column "Billing Type" if set to "Automatic" will result in the recurring transaction to be run at Transfirst. These transactions are outside our control and we will not have any idea as to what has happened or will happen.

If you have any questions please let us know.

[dannywynne]

My apologies - I did not receive an email notification on the 10/16 posting and am just now seeing this.

The contact that you have for Marion R looks correct. I will follow up with her to confirm that she is receiving your calls.

The next run of recurring transactions will run over the next several days. Hopefully the changes have corrected the issue. We will get back to you based on the results.