So, WindCave's status page and incident reporting are distinctly less clear and less responsive than Tessitura's, but I'm reading this as an active incident that is now in it's sixth day with no update, further information, or resolution:
We use First Data, so this applies directly to us.
We have also had a number of incidences reported to us by customers of charges going through on a failed transaction. When we examine it in the WindCave portal, it shows as a voided transaction, and as far as I know we're not getting the money, but the customer can show us the transaction in their credit card history.
Is anyone else having these issues?
Update:
I missed this new line this morning (order of entries is counter-intutitive...):
"February 16, 2023 21:34 UTC[Identified] Windcave is continuing to work with FirstData to get the issue resolved as soon as possible."
So I guess some progress is being made?
Hi, we recently had an issue with Windcave/FirstData that sounds kind of similar to what you reported, but at the same time sounds a little different than what is listed as 'ongoing' on the Windcave status page.
About 2 weeks ago we started seeing transactions in Windcave that were Declined (followed by a Void), but these transactions were ending up in First Data as approved. Therefore we were receiving money from charges on our patrons' cards from FirstData for transactions that were declined in Windcave and weren't in Tessitura at all. We had to find them all and then manually issue credits to the cards in the First Data portal.
Windcave said this was due to an issue they were having where Voids were getting delayed being sent out, and therefore First Data wasn't receiving the Voids before their cutoff time. They told us that this Void delay issue was resolved on February 15th, and so we're currently monitoring our reporting from First Data to confirm that this is the case.
Anyway, this sounds kind of similar when you're saying that your patrons are seeing charges going through on failed transactions.
That may well be happening for us: I don't think we have direct First Data access, so we're trying to find out.
Hi, we use First Data via Windcave too. And yes, the last few weeks have been a nightmare. But it’s about to get way more complicated because an hour ago I received an email from our Windcave rep saying they are discontinuing their gateway to Fiserv (First Data) on May 19th! They’ve offered to help us move to THEIR merchant services. This is a problem for us. A big one.
Nancy, we're in exactly the same boat. I'm pressing Windcave to match our current pricing and buy us out of our existing Fiserv contract. They seem to be considering our requests and are supposed to get back to me next week. Truly awful situation to put a customer, and clearly a money grab. Ugh.
Um, I don't think that's negotiable for us, as I believe the First Data relationship is through the University.
I've had loads of troubles with void transactions clearing & not being acknowledged by First data. It took us years of talking to Windcave, Tessitura and the back to even identify the issue.
The forced shift to Windcave merchant services for some banks over here is starting to be a thing. It's really annoying because there is a 3 year contract on their gateway
3 year on the Windcave Merchant contract? Our rep told me 2, and I explicitly told her I would not sign more than 1. They didn’t object….perhaps room for negotiation?
Thanks for the tip
We use Windcave with Fiserv (First Data) as well and experienced the issues with voids. It appears to have started on 1/29/2023; we first noticed it because of AVS check failures (which we use on our website) that still settled even though they were supposedly voided. The timeouts on 2/4 were particularly troublesome.
We were not told it has been resolved; hopefully that's the case!
We need to figure out what to do as well given they are retiring their gateway to Fiserv. Three months notice does not seem reasonable at all to me.
Ah sounds like you had the exact same issue we did. We started having issues with AVS declines on Jan 29 as well. Yeah they told us it was resolved on the 15th so hopefully you’re seeing an improvement now.
Just FYI: the WindCave outage reports here:
https://status.windcave.com/pages/incident/58e6ca0f5e3d3eed20000ce2/63debea8199ce205baf8fda9
This is exactly what we experienced, but it started on 2/4 and seemed to have finally been fixed on 2/12.
Also, anyone here know how to download a search from Payline as a CSV? The reports we have don't seem to allow us to search (or display) Transaction Type, which we need to find the voids, and the regular Transaction Search doesn't have an obvious "Download Results" button.
There isn't one that I could find. When we onboarded with Windcave 16 months' ago, I had them set up a special report that they just send to me each day. Usually I just archive them, but found them useful to import into SQL once this all started for us.
Our recent issues were WebDev issues but nevertheless like Nancy we we had a Full Transaction report sent to us daily as csv and we dowloaded it - uploaded in a local SQLServer and compared with T_PAYMENT (DpsTxnRef with ccref_no) to get a picture of where the mismatches are.