Partial Credit Approval

[SteveH]

A customer wants to pay with a credit card and for whatever reason, the authorization ends up being a partial approval. What do you do? Example: Charge goes in for $50. Credit is approved for $25. The customer has no money or another credit card to finish the sale. How can you close the sale? You can't void it because it isn't finished. The register is basically hung on this transaction!

Is there a way to disable a partial approvals? This is the root cause of the problem.

One of our cashiers ran into this the other day and ended up deleting the items in the sale (not sure how this is legal either since one of the items was partially paid for). Then rang up a new customer with a new item for cash and the original sale item was obliterated but the partial credit card charge was still in there. This all happened in a single register receipt number. The End of Day recorded the correct amount for cash sales (i.e. picked up the second item sold for cash) but was over by the partial credit card amount for credit card charges.

We use Mercury for CC processing and had to call them to get this straightened out - voiding the partial charge.

[SteveH]

Mercury's response: The POS program needs to be able to send a Void or Return request for that transaction.

A little more research into the Partial Approval process shows Mastercard and I believe Discover both require this type of approval. In the event the customer cannot pay the balance, a Real Time Reversal is performed which is basically a void sent from the merchant.

So, what is the best way to close out a sale that is partially paid for?

[ronaldrwl]

If the sale is still open then you can process another payment.  Click on the Split payment.  Also, a payment can always be voided.  One easy way is to open the Sales / Sales Information window and click on the payment to be voided.

[SteveH]

Thanks. I verified that this worked with a split sale. Assuming the partial authorization updates the total properly (which I assume it does but can't easily test it), then this ought to work.

Thanks.