When deciding how to manage your transactions you will need to know and understand the two terms below when making your decision:
- Auth or Reserve:
This term refers to the funds being reserved on a customer's credit card on a successful transaction. This means these funds are set aside and cannot be used by the customer, but not yet transferred to the merchant's account.
- Settle or Finalise:
This refers to the customer's authorised funds being debited from the credit card. These settled transaction funds will reflect in the merchant's account once the interbank settlement processes have run, which typically take anywhere between 1 -7 working days.
There are two ways to manage your transactions:
- Transaction requests from your website will have a transaction type of request 'RESERVE'. These transactions, if successful, will need an additional intervention as you will need to Settle (FINALIZE) the transaction
- Transaction requests, from your website have a transaction type of PAYMENT. These transactions, if successful, will need no additional intervention from you as the settlement request is part of the incoming transaction request.
You will need to note that unsettled authorizations (RESERVE) are typically released by the cardholder's bank after 7 days. Once released by the cardholder's bank, requesting to Settle (FINALIZE) may fail and you therefore will be unable to receive payment against the authorization.
Therefore, if you have selected to process an upfront authorisation (RESERVE) request, please make sure that you either;
- Implement a settlement call (FINALIZE) or
- manually settle (Finalise) your transactions in the PayU Merchant portal
within 7 days of submitting the authorization request.