Transactions
Purchasing information is sent to your payment gateway in an action called a transaction. This includes the customer's billing information and amount of money to be charged, voided, or refunded.
Dashboard
Your transactions dashboard provides an overview of all transactions processed through Recurly. Transactions can be searched by transaction UUID, customer first name, last name, account code, the last four digits of the card number, card type, payment gateway reference ID, transaction amount or currency. The filters on this view allow you to group transactions by type and response:
- Payments
- Purchases processed through Recurly.
- Refunds
- Refunds processed on a previously-successful Recurly transaction.
- Authorizations
- $0 or $1 transactions used to verify billing information, voided immediately.
- Successful
- Transactions approved by the payment gateway.
- Declined
- Transactions declined by the payment gateway.
- Voided
- Transactions voided before the payment settled.
Creating a Transaction
Transactions are automatically created when an invoice is set to be processed. A transaction is created either as the result of a subscription action (creation, renewal, modification) or a charge being created and invoiced on the account.
Structure
- General Details
- The transaction type (payment, refund, authorization, etc.), status (success, declined, voided), amount of the transaction, and the customer's billing information including card type and address information (if collected).
- Fraud Details
- Typically just informative, indicating the type of address checks performed by the payment gateway.
- Additional Details
- Useful in tracking the reason for a transaction decline. This section will provide any error codes or messages returned by the payment gateway. It will also contain a reference number which can be used for finding the transaction inside a third-party payment gateway virtual terminal.
Settling Transactions
At time of purchase, your payment gateway connects to their credit card processors to verify the customer’s billing information and ensure that funds are available. When the response is a success the funds are held and the transaction amount deducted from the customer’s bank account balance. At the end of the day, the payment gateway will submit these transactions for finalized processing and the funds are released to the merchant. The difference between a settled and unsettled transaction will impact how voids, refunds, and partial refunds occur.
Authorizations
When billing information is added or updated to an account Recurly issues a $1.00 authorization charge (Or $0.00 authorization, for gateways that support a feature called Zero Dollar Authorizations) to verify the customer’s billing information. Once Recurly receives a success/decline response from the gateway, this charge is voided. Subscription plans with trials will also process an authorization charge to verify the customer’s billing data at signup.
Refunds and Voids
An unsettled transaction can be voided—stopping the transaction from processing and removing it from the customer’s account. Once a transaction has been settled it can only be refunded. Because payment gateways have different processing times for settling transaction, Recurly will automatically attempt a void before processing a refund. Partial refunds can only be issued on a settled transaction, so please wait 24 hours after an initial transaction has processed before attempting a partial refund.
A voided transaction will typically disappear from a customer’s credit/debit account statement within 24 hours, while a refund may take 3 to 5 business days to appear on a customer’s credit/debit account statement.
A refund will always be issued to the card used on the original payment.
Fraud Velocity Checks
All transactions are passed through a simple fraud velocity filter before being passed on to the payment gateway. This doesn’t guarantee that no fraud will occur, but it will reduce the possibility of large volumes of fraudulent transactions. Please note that the following limits only apply to sites in production mode.
- All transactions (including authorizations)
- Limited to 20 per hour from the same IP address.
- New subscriptions
- Limited to 10 per hour for the same account.
- Billing info updates
- Limited to 10 per 24 hours for the same account.
If any of these limits are exceeded, transactions will fail with the “fraud_velocity” error code, and your customer will be notified to contact support.
In order for the fraud velocity filter to properly enforce the IP based rules, you must provide your customer’s actual IP address. If no address is provided for the transaction, or if a local address is provided, such as “127.x.x.x” or “10.x.x.x”, we cannot accurately detect fraudulent behavior.
If you’d like to disable fraud velocity checks for your site, please contact support.
CSV Export
Your transactions dashboard allows a full export of your customer transaction data in CSV format. This export contains the following columns: account_code, name, transaction_id, type, amount, tax_amount, currency, date, status, message, test, cvv_result, avs_result, avs_result_postal, avs_result_street, action, reference, description, state, country, original_transaction_id, invoice_id.