Anyone else have a processing outage with Element this evening?
Wondering what best practices people have come up with for dealing with that sort of situation. Tonight we had to improvise, so we invoiced orders and then hauled out the old imprinter to record card information, with the intent of authorizing those cards in Tessitura after processing is restored. But this has some issues: for one, a constituent record must be attached to the order to use an invoice, whereas we would typically create walk-up sales as anonymous orders. And the reconciliation process to me is a bit inelegant, since the imprinter is basically being used as a notepad. And I'd rather not create invoices to work around a payment processing issue.
An alternative method that I'm exploring would be to create a new payment method for backup imprinter card processing, and actually define this as a "Check" payment type. This would let us use the Check # field to record the serial number on the credit card imprinter form. The imprinter form would be used exactly as designed, and transactions would all be entered into the Element virtual terminal for processing.
I like this because it doesn't prolong the payment process on the Tessitura side of things, we don't make invoices where there really weren't any, and the payments themselves are trackable since they occur in a distinct payment method. I do see, however, that this might add a complication for those people who have reports to reconcile/audit element transactions with Tessitura ones.
I sent an email to the network about adding something for this situation to the "outage contingency planning" documentation page, but I'm interested if other members of the community have some comments.
We have a 'POS machine' payment method that works similarly. For our gala we rent a point of sale system and charge all the auction purchases on the night of. After we create the contributions and pay with 'POS machine' so the large blob of income from them goes to the correct GLs. You would just have to make check number required to record the serial number for tracking.
Once element has recovered you can zero out that payment method and charge their card through the system like a normal order.