Versions: 8.5 and Higher

There are many places in Elliott where you may be processing a credit card transaction only to discover that the card has expired.  Before this release, each situation was evaluated on its own as to whether or not it should be allowed.  In some situations, the implementations on expiration checking are not entirely consistent. Now, we are giving you more specific options for handling an expired credit card and ensuring that an expired card is always handled according to your choice of options.

To view or change your expired card options, launch the System Utilities / Global Setup  task from the Control Center.  Select the menu item Add-Ons / On-line Credit Process as shown below:

For each option (in red box above), you may select "Y" or "N."

• "Y" means allow the transaction to go through if the user confirms that the expired date is OK.
• "N" means do not allow an expired card to be used in the specified situations.

The default values are shown here.  If you do not specifically set these options, these are the default values. Generally speaking, we do not allow expired credit cards to be processed. However, we do allow for  "Complete" transactions that are expired. The reason for this is that "Complete" transactions are paired with "PreAuth" transactions. Since systems typically enforce expiration logic with "PreAuth" transactions, on the last date of a month when a credit card is going to expire, the system will allow the "PreAuth" transaction.  Therefore, the system should allow processing the "Complete" transaction with the expired credit card early the following month.

Additionally, it makes sense to allow refunds for expired credit cards. In rare situations, you may need to charge a credit card even though it has expired. In many cases, even if the customer's credit card is expired based on your records, the credit card may have been renewed with the same card number. The only difference is that you may not know the new expiration date. In that case, the credit card issuer may still allow charges to be made to that credit card, especially in recurring billing scenarios. However, please be aware that you may incur a higher credit card merchant rate in such scenarios. Therefore, even if you set the policy in Global Setup to allow charging expired credit cards, it is still best practice to ask your customers to update their credit card expiration dates.

In the first example below, the user is attempting to add a credit card payment (Sale) to an order.  The expiration date, 05/22, has expired.  The system simply rejects it because that option is set to "N."

The option settings specified in the On-Line Credit Process screen above will be honored by Elliott Web Services, with the exception that, because there is no user interaction, processing will continue if the corresponding option is set to "Y" and will fail if the corresponding option is set to "N."