Start a Credit Card Processing Process

When you run a credit card processing process, the program creates a transmission file and sends the file to the Blackbaud Payment Service to authorize and process credit card transactions through your merchant account and gateway. The Blackbaud Payment Service replaces the reference tokens in the transmission file with their respective credit card numbers and sends the file to the payment gateway associated with the selected merchant account. The payment gateway then authorizes or rejects the credit card transactions, and designates each transaction with authorization or rejection codes A rejection code is sent when a credit card transaction is rejected by the payment processor. They can be permanent (if the card is expired, for example) or provisional (if there are insufficient funds on the card)..

After the payment gateway authorizes the transactions, the Blackbaud Payment Service returns the transmission file so your organization can commit the revenue batch. When the batch is committed, the program automatically creates payment records for the transactions.

Note: The program classifies transactions that the payment gateway rejects as either permanent or provisional rejections. We recommend you configure rejection handling to try to reauthorize transactions that have provisional rejections, such as transactions with insufficient funds, a banking server error, or when the processor cannot otherwise process the transaction. You can also configure rejection handling to remove transactions with permanent rejections from the batch and generate a selection that you can use with targeted communications to the cardholders, such as for credit cards that are expired, reported lost or stolen, invalid, or not supported by the processor.