ACH transactions rejected in TransFirst

[mjokiman]

Hi,

We noticed in TransFirst that there are many transactions starting on the 11th of May that were "Rejected". And the reason is: Transaction initiated within 6 banking days of the orig of prenote
In NPSP, they're listed as "Received". Some examples:

175167302958097245
175167301728073477

And many more. I've called TransFirst, and they have no idea what generated this rejection transactions.

Please let me know ASAP.

[CnP.Support]

Good day mjokiman

Our team has been investigating this and have finally received the reason. This is a new regulation that is not validated in our system.

Based on what we have learned, NACHA voids any pre-authorizations that are not done within 6 days after the initial validation. In other words, after you run the pre-authorization you have six days to run the transaction for an actual amount.

Our pre-authorization is done for ACH with $0 (just like a credit card) and then they are run with the set amount on the first transaction.

In your case your pre-authorizations were run more than 6 days prior to the recurring run. All these ACH transactions need to be run again as either actual transactions now or maximum six days prior to the next run.

we are sorry for this - we had never seen this before and apparently this is a new regulation. We are going to add this validation to our virtual terminal for the next update- limiting the future date to 5 days for safety.

Every day is a new regulation.

[mjokiman]

Thanks for the response. For the 1st example I mentioned above, we set up the recurring transaction on May 12th for the 1st charge date to start on the 16th. that's only 4 days, right? This new regulation shouldn't have affected this transaction? I think the same as the other ones as well.....

[CnP.Support]

Good day mjokiman

This is the reason we were told of NACHA rejection.

Do you have the order number for the pre-authorization transactions? - we just need one or two for verification

[mjokiman]

Yes, these are the ones I mentioned above:

175167302958097245
175167301728073477

[mjokiman]

We really need to know what's the max future date so that we do not run into this issue in the future, or now when we try to run this again. FYI...we do have donors who call us let's say today and want to set up a recurring transaction starting next month, next week, or whichever day they tell us. It'll be good to know the exact regulation so that we don't take the donor payment information, letting them know we got them all set up only to find out later that it's not going through. Thanks.

[CnP.Support]

Good day mjokiman

Sorry.. this is so confusing and so not making sense.

I totally mis-read this.. the regulation is the pre-authorization has to run after the 6th day. How does that make sense we have no clue.

So if you run this after the 6th day it should work. When did you do the pre-authorization?

See this: "NACHA Rules: Once validating the receiver's bank routing and account information (prenote/preauth) a waiting period of 6 days must be met before initiating "live" entries."

How do they come up with these regulations is sometimes amusing.

The waiting period of 6 days means you can run this after 6 days from the pre-authorization. Perhaps that is the timeline for validating the routing and account number by NACHA but based on the above statement there is no problem with what you have done, we should just wait for 6 days before running it.

Here is what you can do:

• The recurring transactions are still in the queue to run on their set date as set before. The rejection is not posted to our system so our system will run them again and as such the next recurring should be fine.
• Wait for 6 days from the time you ran the pre-authorization and then use the card on file and process a single transaction for one of these individuals using the Virtual Terminal. It should work then. Let us know when you run them so we follow through with Transfirst. Based on your pre-authorization the safe day to run it again is next Tuesday.

Sorry for the inconvenience. This may not have been detected before since our clients may not have set it up with 6 days window since the regulation change.

Please let us know when the transaction has processed.

[CnP.Support]

Good day mjokiman

We are researching this but seeing conflicting information from NACHA. Please see:




In here, it appears that they say it should be 3 days.

We are seeing gateways reporting this as either 3 or 6 days. Still researching it.

[mjokiman]

As you can see from those 2 examples above, I set up the transactions for each one of them on the 12th. So it should be then cleared by today, yes? I'm not clear as to the instructions you've given on what we can do:

• The recurring transactions are still in the queue to run on their set date as set before. The rejection is not posted to our system so our system will run them again and as such the next recurring should be fine. In the example above, we set it up on the 12th for the 1st payment to start on the 16th. Since the 16th has passed and it's rejected, I'm assuming what you meant by 'the next recurring should be fine' is next month...June 16th, right? That the 1st recurring donation should be fine on June 16th and on each month...?

• Wait for 6 days from the time you ran the pre-authorization and then use the card on file and process a single transaction for one of these individuals using the Virtual Terminal. It should work then. Let us know when you run them so we follow through with Transfirst. Based on your pre-authorization the safe day to run it again is next Tuesday. Again, with the example above, the set up was on the 12th. Today is the 6th day, so as you instructed, I should run a single transaction today and it should go through? And if so, then I would have 2 transactions in Salesforce that's showing "Received". One with the close date of the 16th (because this is the 1st charge date) and today's date? I would then changed the status of the May 16th to something else other than 'received' because essentially on the 16th the transaction did not take place?

So far, I have 38 transactions with the "Rejected" status which begins on May 11th. And I have a few more scheduled to be processed tomorrow.

I have a few that I need to set up with the 1st charge date of the 20th and 21st (on the weekend). How do I set this up so the system will charge this coming Saturday and Sunday?

[mjokiman]

Hi Leona, I've left you a voicemail and sending you an email as well. I did exactly as you've advised me to do, which is to process the ACH transactions for the 28th and on on the 19th of May to make sure we don't run into the above issue. However, i'm still seeing the same rejection status with the same reason.