Credit Card Transmission Files

To electronically credit a transaction to a constituent’s credit card, you must create a credit card transmission file to send to the Blackbaud Payment Service. The Blackbaud Payment Service interfaces with your payment gateway or authorization service such as Blackbaud Merchant Services or IATS to securely process and authorize credit card transactions. To process your transmission files, you must set up a merchant account with your payment gateway. If the system administrator has properly configured your merchant account information, the Blackbaud Payment Service and your payment gateway automatically interface with each other to process your credit card transmission file requests. For more information about Blackbaud Merchant Services, refer to Merchant Accounts for the Blackbaud Payment Service. Based on the merchant account number for the transmission file, the payment gateway attempts to obtain an authorization code for each transaction.

If the credit card transaction is approved, the Blackbaud Payment Service puts an authorization code that starts with “Y” in the Authorization code field of the revenue batch. The payment processor verifies sufficient funds exist in the account for transfer. If sufficient funds exist, the authorization service processes the credit card and transfers the funds to your organization’s bank account.

If the credit card transaction is rejected, the payment processor adds “N” in front of the authorization code. When the program receives the response, it removes “N” from the authorization code, converts the code to text, and puts the text in the Rejection Code field of the revenue batch. You can configure rejection handling when you add or edit a credit card processing process. Rejection handling is a useful way to work with all the rejected transactions in your revenue batch.

The program classifies 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). as permanent or provisional.

• Examples of permanent rejection codes include when the credit card is expired, reported lost or stolen, invalid, or is not supported by the processor. When you configure how to handle permanent rejections, you can select to remove the transactions from the revenue batch and generate a selection that you can use with targeted communications to the cardholders, such as to request updated information.

• Examples of provisional rejection codes include insufficient funds, a banking server error, or when the processor cannot otherwise process the transaction. When you configure how to handle provisional rejections, you can select to generate a separate retry batch that you can use to try to reauthorize the declined card.

After the payment gateway authorizes or rejects your credit card transactions, the Blackbaud Payment Service returns the batch with the applicable authorization codes so you can commit the transactions to the database. When you commit the batch, all authorized payments are applied and the payment records are added to your database. The program manages rejected payments based on your configured rejection handling.

Note: To help you comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), you cannot access the transmission file generated by the program or received from the Blackbaud Payment Service.

For information about how to create and manage credit card transmission files, refer to Credit Card Processing.