Processing Manual Credit Card payments consists of two basic steps.
• Capturing a sale transaction against the authorization for each of the sales orders that were invoiced. This action charges the customer credit card for the amount of the sale and it releases the credit card authorization that was obtained before the order was shipped.
• Applying the credit card payment for each invoice to the invoice using the Cash Application program. This action creates an AR Payment record for each credit card payment, and it pays off the credit card invoice.
Capturing the Sale Transaction
Processing a sale against the order authorizations can be accomplished using a standard query or report of the unpaid manual credit card invoices in the system, and the credit card information that is stored in each invoice. The standard query can be used to identify the unpaid manual credit card invoices, and the Invoice Detail option in the query program allows you to view the credit card information (cc number, expiration date, authorization amount, authorization number) associated with the invoice.
The information in each unpaid manual credit card invoice is used along with the 3rd party software or hardware you are using to process your credit card transactions. The sale transactions are processed (using the 3rd party software or hardware), and then the successful sales transactions are processed as payments in the Cash Application program.
Applying Credit Card Payments to Invoices.
Once you have processed the sale transactions for the current batch of credit card invoices, the credit card payments are applied to the appropriate invoices using the Cash Application program.
The credit card sale transactions are normally entered into Cash Application using a unique batch (to allow you to check the payment totals against the activity shown by your credit card processor), and they are entered using a unique check or transaction number (this can be the merchant transaction id, or a constructed check number (like VS122411-1). The payments are also normally processed using a dedicated credit card clearing account (again to segregate the payments for reconciliation purposes).