ACH failed transaction due to Accepta

Alicia Searfoss

Is anyone else dealing with this issue?  What have you done to minimize the damage?

Here's what happened to us:

We received an email from a donor upset because she received an email about her monthly donation failing.  She was adament that her bank statement showed it went through.  So when we researched the decline, we saw an odd error and opened a trouble ticket.  This is what support said occurred:"

"The ACH failed transaction is due to Accepta (aka: DCAS/Paytech) maintenance in which their response codes were changed, causing issues with Luminate Online. This was not caused by Luminate changes. We are working with Accepta/Paytech to resolve this issue."

While it would have been helpful to have had a heads up that this happened before we started getting complaints, now we're working to contain the fall out.  Apparently, the payments are really going through, but Luminate doesn't recognize that.  So, all our monthly donors were getting failure messages.  Also, since they look like declines, the system was set up to try it again in 3 days (which is what we have set up for failures.)  Any one-time donors trying to donate were getting failure messages, so they tried again - some several times.

Here is what we have done so far:

• Verified that trying to add a new donation with ACH was saying it failed, but processed anyway.  I used my personal checking and it definitely went through.
• We have over 500 donation forms, but about 75 are most commonly used for various reasons.  We went through and removed the ACH option from those and disabled the failed autoresponder from going out.
• Since the payments were going through, we didn't want to put the payments on hold for the 300+ monthly donors.  Instead, we're running the declined report every day and skipping the next payment.  That way, the system won't try to run it again.  We run the risk of people calling in to complain, but so far, that has been minimal.
• Prepared our Donor Relations department to explain that there is a technical issue. 

We still don't know what how they're going to manage getting these transactions back into Luminate and then synch with our offline database.  I have a bad feeling I'll have to add them in manually.  All the one-time donations that tried to go through will need refunded, but can't do that via Luminate as it is now because they don't show up.  We'll have to see.


If there is anything else we should consider, please let me know.


Thanks!


Alicia

 

Bob DuVall

Hi Alicia,

We are in the same boat and have taken similar steps. I noticed this morning that ACH recurring gifts are showing up in Luminate again so apparently this was fixed some time yesterday. One change we did make a few days ago was to add iATS as an ACH processor in Luminate so that all future ACH gifts will be processed by iATS. (iATS was already our credit card processor.) Existing recurring gifts will be processed by Accepta.

Thanks,

Bob

Alicia Searfoss

Thanks, Bob.  I'm so frustrated with the lack of communication.  Have they told you how we're going to get all these transactions back into Luminate?  

Michael Maggio

Alicia Searfoss:

Thanks, Bob.  I'm so frustrated with the lack of communication.  Have they told you how we're going to get all these transactions back into Luminate?  

Alicia,


We had the same issue.  What a mess!  Accepta is not the easiest company to work with.  It is good news to hear that IATS does do EFT's. 


I am curious about one of your solutions...

 

• Since the payments were going through, we didn't want to put the payments on hold for the 300+ monthly donors.  Instead, we're running the declined report every day and skipping the next payment.  That way, the system won't try to run it again.  We run the risk of people calling in to complain, but so far, that has been minimal.

We have retrys set to 4 upon a failed transaction which is causing us even more headaches because we are seeing 4+ transactions for each falsely flagged transaction.  If you are skipping next payments for all failed transactions how does this solve the issue for the current transaction?  Is there a best practice for number of retrys?


Another thing to consider is that even though this issue is fixed, each one of these failed transactions will still show in LO as a failed transaction and the sustainer will show Lapsed. The LO record will not reflect what actually happened. 


Mike

 

Alicia Searfoss

As we saw the declined, we skipped the next payment on the donor's profile so the system wouldn't try again until the regularly scheduled day.   Here's what support said today:

I just received word that the ACH processing issue is now resolved. We have confirmed that Accepta/Paytech has adjusted the bad response codes (that were changed during a recent update of theirs) that were causing the transactions to fail in Luminate Online. At this time, ACH transactions can now successfully processes through LO, using Accepta/Paytech.

Our engineering teams are now working with Accepta to identify all transactions that may have been impacted while this issue was occurring, and discuss remediation options, however I don't have more info on that process yet. I'll let you  know when I find out more, about clean-up efforts for transactions affected.

In my experience in the past, we've had to manually create offline donations in Luminate when we had processor issues several years ago, but we'll see.  Hopefully Luminate will be able to create these gifts for us so there won't be even more work on my little team.   We have a synch with our offline database, FoxPro, so then we have to figure out how to get those gifts down into the other database.


This is such a mess.  We're still handling the fall out with donors and I'm sure there are some one-time donations that we don't even know about yet because the declined people weren't our normal donors.  I was able to finally refund a few transactions on the Accepta portal so make a few people happy. 


 

Bob DuVall

Hi Alicia,

I have not heard anything from support yet on getting the missing transactions into LO. Thank you for posting the feedback you received from support this afternoon. That was very helpful.

Bob

Alicia Searfoss

I think we're finally done with all of this.  Support provided a list. 

Here is what they suggested:

In the file attached yesterday, contains the Constituent/Contact ID for Luminate Online.

Each line reads:

> XX -,

> Your organizations short name,  (Luminate Online)

> Constituent/Contact ID,  (Luminate Online)

> Authorization code from Accepta, (0000, , #########################)

> Confirmation Code (Luminate Online)

While we can assist with Luminate Online functionality, we can not decide what is best  for the organization on how to track the issue that occurred through Accepta. - I do want to provide you with a few options on how you can track this in Luminate Online; but please make sure that your organization understands the options and chooses the option that works best for you based on what functionality is available in Luminate Online.

One Time Gifts:

- Manually enter the one-time gifts that successfully processed, but do not appear in LO.

Sustaining Gifts:

1. Refund ALL sustaining gifts through Accepta.

> Re-enable your site setting for re-attempting the charge

> All all sustaining gifts to charge, so they are both approved and show associated with the sustaining gift.

*This method would ensure the constituents were only charged once, all past charges were refunded AND you would have a record of the gift in your database.

OR

2. Put a note in your reporting of how many gifts should appear in LO for this time frame but do not.

Sustaining gifts are the hardest, as there is no way to enter a payment into LO and associate it with that sustaining gift. If your end goal is to have physical data inside of LO, #1 for Sustaining Gifts is the best option.

What I did:

• Refunded any duplicates through the Accepta portal
• Converted any forms from impacted monthly gifts to offline/online and added the gifts manually in Luminate via the donor's constituent profile
• Notified our Donor Relations department so they could handle any negative feedback