We've had a recent spate of failed payment transactions where a payment is submitted and Tessitura crashes immediately after. The result is that there is not transaction in Tessitura, but the transaction is registered with our merchant bank. We're relatively on top of it, at least when it comes to double charges. But we've had a few cancellations recently, which has led to a large number of refunds. When there is a refund that goes through to the payment processor, but not Tessitura, we cannot reverse the transaction. Previously this was happening and the box office wasn't immediately following up with a second transaction, so we could just file the transaction into some throwaway payment method so that it would be logged in Tessitura. But recently we've had cases where there has been a double refund: basically we've just given the customer a hundred dollars or so extra. Does anyone have a best practice around dealing with accidental double refunds?
Hi Gawain,
I deal with this exact issue a lot. I do payment express to Tessitura reconciliations about every 2 weeks or so and more often then not have one or two of these situations where we've given back $$ in payment express but there is no record in Tess.
How I deal with this depends on the current state of the order when its brought to my attention:
1) If Tess crashed on a rep and they are proactive they'll contact the help desk before trying the refund again. In this case the refund has only been given once so I have the rep use a "SNAFU" payment method to redo the refund transaction. After they've completed the order I will "reclaim" the previously given refund that resulted in the application crash with a script that updates the T_PAYMENT rows to point to that refund that was previously lost. The SNAFU payment method is just a way to save the order in Tess temporarily so I can change the rows.
2) If I find it on my own at reconciliation time and the order has been completed already because the rep just retried the refund, I have the customer services manager contact the patron to let them know of the situation and verify that they see the extra refund(s). At that time they also let them know they'll see a correcting charge soon. There are two ways to make that happen, get the full card details from them and make the charge in the payment express portal so that the extra refund is balanced by a charge that doesn't appear in Tess. Or if we have the card on file I can use the method from #1 to reclaim the refund in an order and then within Tess use the card on file to make the balancing charge. The second is probably a better option because you can use payment notes to notate what happened.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Sean
That's exactly what I was looking for, thanks! I'll try to drag the relevant parties together to go over this and hopefully come up with a plan.
How often are you getting this issue? I feel like we've been seeing a rush of these issues starting about a month or so ago. We're on 14.1.11 currently.
More often then I would like. But I'd guess 1 or two a week and yes I feel like more have been happening as of late but we're on on 15.0.6 so no correlation there. Are you using payment express maybe the issue is there and our different versions are similarly affected?
S
Nevermind, I should have read above, you are on payment express....
What appears to be happening for us is that Tessitura crashes while waiting for (or maybe upon receiving?) the transaction confirmation from Payment Express. It's obviously sporadic, and we don't have any way to consistently duplicate it -- naturally, the Box Office just reopens Tessitura, starts the order again from scratch, and the second time it invariably works. Up until about a month or so ago we would see one of these maybe every other month, now we see several a week. We had a big sale at the beginning of the year that usually drives a lot of traffic, so I think the current uptick can only be partially explained by our season going onsale (we're only selling subscription packages at the moment, so the traffic isn't actually all that high, just the dollar amounts -- all the more fun when we double charge someone $1000).