Payment Processing 101

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Payment Processing 101 webinar. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the absolute pleasure of getting to be your guys trainer today for our Payment Processing webinar. We’re going to be focusing in today primarily on introducing you to Read More

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our Payment Processing 101 webinar. My name is Amanda Tadrzynski, and I have the absolute pleasure of getting to be your guys trainer today for our Payment Processing webinar. We’re going to be focusing in today primarily on introducing you to the benefits of Payment Processing, some of the tools that become available to you to help you streamline your processing efforts and some resources so that when you are implementing this, you have some how to guides to reference back to you.

So what are some of the benefits of Payment Processing? Well, one using our payment processing solutions mean you have a one stop payment processing solution, which includes being able to charge credit cards from within, DonorPerfect automatically process your monthly givers every month, and even purchase swipe devices so you can accept payments on the go. By having a one stop payment processing solution, you can save time by eliminating the need to re enter data for reoccurring donations and eliminate multiple processing services as well as their associated fees, which can help increase potential revenue by giving you the ability to handle any type of electronic payment through our Secure PCI or payment card industry compliant processing gateways. So piece. So while all of these are tools, we’re going to primarily be focusing on non monthly giving and Instacharge features in this particular webinar. Now that we know the benefits of payment processing, let’s walk through at a very high level, the overflow or the an overview of how the flow of information works with our payment processing.

So everything starts by the customer or your donor, essentially initiating the payment processing service. So they either are going to a donation form and making a one time gift. Or it could be the donor perfect system of processing your monthly donors. Or it could be you processing a gift through Instacharge. So essentially, non payment data is entered, and the donor or yourself will enter the card information, and that then sends a message to the donor, perfect save save gateway. The donor, perfect safe save gateway is going to then send a message to your merchant processor, and the merchant processor is the entity that essentially approves or declines your payment. They’re then going to send that approval or decline back to the gateway, and the gateway is going to then display a message and let you know if that payment was approved or declined. So essentially, everything is initiated either by a DonorPerfect filling out a donation form with the intention of looking to make a donation. It’s initiated by you using the Instacharge feature to process a donor’s credit card through DonorPerfect, or it’s initiated through our automatic monthly giving tool. Once the payment is initiated, that sends the message to the Save save gateway to say a payment is being attempted, the gateway will then send a message to the merchant processor to seek approval. From there, the merchant processor will send the approval or decline message to the gateway, and then the gateway is going to finally display a message to confirm was the payment successfully processed or declined. Now, just to confirm, for those of you that are in the US, your merchant processor and gateway provider are both safe, safe. For those of you that are in Canada, your merchant processor is Paysafe and your gateway provider is safe, safe.

So let’s actually walk through, then some of the payment processing solution. So one of our payment processing solutions you get when you sign up for a safe save gateway and a safe save merchant account, or a safe save gateway and a pay safe merchant account, if you use. Are in Canada, is access to our Instacharge feature. Instacharge allows you to process credit cards in real time, which makes these perfect for one time transactions that you can take over the phone, face to face, or for people who are responding to direct mail appeals with their payment information. So Instacharge is primarily used to process one time gifts. However, it can also be used to create monthly gifts quickly and easily as well. And the best part is there’s no credit card terminals, phone lines or extra software. You just need to have a credential to log into DonorPerfect, and you have to be set up with a gateway and the merchant processor.

So let’s go into DonorPerfect, and let’s take a look at what the Instacharge feature looks like. So when you’re locked in the Donor Perfect, and you either have a return slip from a direct mail with the donor’s payment information on it, or you’re on the phone with a donor and you’re looking to process their card over the phone. Once you’re in DonorPerfect, you’re going to come into quick search and look up that donor’s record. I’m going to come up into Quick Search in the top right corner and look for my donor. Dorothy Gale. You can click on the donor’s name. I’m once you’re in the donors record, you’re going to move to the gift tab, the second tab over from the main data entry table. And once you’re in the gift tab, you click on the button, Instacharge when we click on the button, Instacharge, what that’ll do is it’s going to open up the ability for you to then select, do you want to create a one time donation, or would you like to create a monthly reoccurring Gift? We’re going to do one time for today, your next step will be to insert the amount of the donation that the donor would like to give. So Dorothy Gale is going to make $150 donation once you’ve entered the gift amount in your next option is to put the credit card information or payment details in now, Dorothy Gale already has a card on file, so the system is defaulting to the visa that ends in 8886 so what this means is, in the past, Dorothy Gale did reach out to us and gave us permission to save her credit card, or she’s a reoccurring monthly donor that has a credit card on file. In either case, the main takeaway is that when we save a donor’s card information, either because they give us permission to do so, or they become a reoccurring donor, where we do save the card for processing purposes. The credit card information is not stored in DonorPerfect. What we’re seeing here is essentially an encrypted version of the card that tells us the card provider and the last four digits on the card the actual credit card information is stored in the Save save gateway. The actual card information is stored in the Save saved gateway, so there is no credit card information that is actually saved and accessible within DonorPerfect. So I can choose to use the existing card, or I can click on New and this lets me add a new credit card or bank account. Option for bank account, you can choose between checking and savings. For credit cards, you can put in then the name on the card, the card number, the expiration date and the security code. You’ll also want to confirm for the donor their first name, last name and address information from here, if the donor would like for you to save this card, because maybe they call you up quite often to make these donations, you have the ability to save the card in the gateway and also save it as a default.

Eight. If the donor is signing up to be a monthly donor, it will be saved automatically as this will be the card that will be used for future payments. Now, again, this is going back to if we think about that infographic, and I’m clicking process. This is me initiating the payment. This is sending the message now to the gateway, and the gateway is seeking permission from the merchant processor, and now the merchant processor sent back the confirmation that the payment was approved. And so what the Safe, safe gateway is doing is displaying the message here that confirms my gift was successfully processed. Now I can close this window, and what DonorPerfect is going to do is redirect me into the blank gift record. The database has already filled out for me that the donation was received on the 15th of August, the donation was $150 gift, and the type of gift was a VISA credit card, and we processed it through Instacharge. The database is also going to capture in the field transaction ID, the actual transaction number that was processed through the safe saved gateway. So if we need to look this transaction up in the gateway, this would be the number to use. This number is also captured in the reference field. Now I can go through and finish entering the rest of the details for my donation.

And if I want, I can even use thank donor to send this donor their receipt while I still have them on the phone. And with that, I’m able to save the gift, and now I have $150 gift successfully processed using Instacharge.

So Instacharge is great for managing one time donations that we want to accept on the phone and one time donation that we want to accept because someone responds into direct mail appeal, or if we want to be able to accept payments from at our desk or at a front desk. Question, How does give cloud fit into the payment processing? So with give cloud, you’re going to set up on the give cloud side, save as a payment processing option in give cloud. So all of the payments are going to be processed through Save, save through the give cloud form, and then the gifts are transferred or sent into DonorPerfect Once they are processed.

Alrighty. So let’s talk about monthly giving, because monthly giving is pretty much becoming the gold standard for almost any nonprofit, because we know that monthly donors are very helpful in being able to sustain our revenue. So we want to make sure if we have a robust monthly giving program, or if we’re just looking for a way to start a monthly giving program that we can automate this as much as possible. So by taking advantage of our payment processing solution, you can set up a monthly giving program that either gives you the option to process your payments automatically, or do a manual reoccurring process where you have the option to decide when payments are processed. The way that the monthly giving tool works is that you create pledge records in DonorPerfect, or pledge records are created through a donor perfect form, or for those of you using the gift cloud integration, when people sign up to be a monthly donor through a gift cloud form, it creates a pledge record for you in Donor Perfect the main or reoccurring component, I think that You should be hearing. Here is the word pledge record. In order for our monthly giving prop automatic processing tools to work, we do need to make sure that a pledge record is created as that is how our monthly giving tool knows when to process the gift. And again. It’s all done using the secure PCI compliance storage of a donor’s payment information, which means, while yes, a credit card is being stored and saved, it is stored and saved in the safe save gateway. It is not stored or saved in Donor Perfect. The only thing we see in DonorPerfect is the type of card in the last four digits.

Alrighty. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to walk you through two pledge setup scenarios. So scenario number one is that we have a monthly donor that wants to set up a monthly gift, but they don’t want to get processed until next month. So they call this up. Said I would like to become a monthly donor, but can I set up my payment so that it doesn’t come out to the first of next month?

So what we would do is we would look up the donor record, we would go into the pledges tab and and we would create a new pledge. Now for our pledge setup, the date of pledge is going to be the date that we’re creating the pledge record in DonorPerfect, the start date is the date of the first gift. So this donor would like to start their pledge payment on September 1. For reoccurring donors that are going to continue to make reoccurring gifts, we leave the total field at zero and the billing amount will be the amount that they’re billed for each payment. Total being zero is how our automatic monthly giving tool knows that this is an open ended, reoccurring or monthly pledge. The frequency is how often the donor is being billed. So I will choose monthly and then we want to set monthly giving to yes and under Payment method, we can add a credit card or a checking account.

So once we set up the pledge, the start date is the date of the first gift, and will act as the billing date moving forward. So this donor will always be billed on the first of the month. They’re going to be billed for $50 every month to their visa, ending in 11111, 111, everything else that I fill out is data entry. So when I receive payments on the pledge, I can track where the payment goes to the general ledger. I can track the campaign and solicitation that helped me receive this pledge, and I can even set up the type of thank you that the donor will receive at the end of the year. And then I can save for people who sign up for monthly giving through a give cloud form, a donor perfect form or an online form when they sign up through the form, the billing date will be the date that they fill out the form. So if I go to a give cloud form today and say I would like to become a monthly donor, it is going to set me up so that I process on the 15th of every month. If I filled that form out on the 23rd I would be processed on the 23rd of every month. So our automatic monthly giving tool looks at the frequency billing, amount, total field and start date to determine when someone is billed, how often they’re billed, and how much they’re billed for.

If we’re going to be changing any details on the pledge, such as the billing date or amount, then what we typically recommend is to close the pledge and create a new one. So to close the pledge, you would take whatever is in the total paid field and paste that into the total field to close the pledge out, and then you would create a brand new one. You cannot change the billing date or the billing amount all. On the existing pledge, because that can sometimes cause the system to incorrectly calculate a delinquent amount. So our best practice is to if you’re making any changes to the PLEDGE DETAILS, to close the pledge and create something brand new. 

Alrighty. So how do we make sure then that payment processing or automatic monthly giving is turned on so that these payments can get processed automatically? Well, that’s going to be done in the navigation bar under the Tasks icon. So the task icon looks like a checklist. From the task icon, you’re going to select the monthly giving option, which is the third option from the top.

Once you’re in the monthly giving tool, to turn on automatic processing. You’re going to come to the left hand side of the screen and click Edit Settings. Editing settings will allow you to turn on automatic processing. You can even turn on automatic receding if you’re in the US, so that your monthly donors can get a thank you letter sent to them every month. We’re not going to talk about the automatic receiving because there’s quite a few steps that go into that process, but you can definitely check out the knowledge base article linked in this section to learn about how to set up those automated tax receipts. In addition to setting up the automatic processing, the other piece you’ll want to set up is who should receive daily confirmation emails about payments that were successfully processed. You can have one email, or you can add additional emails by putting a column, and you can put additional emails here. Anytime you make changes, you click save and hide options to save your pages for those of you who want to be able to process all of your payments on a set schedule, so if you want to make sure that all monthly donations are processed, let’s say on the 15th of the month, what you can do is you can run what’s called a one time batch. So what this means is, regardless of what the donor’s start date is, in DonorPerfect, you can run a one time batch and actually process all monthly payments that are due on a single day. So I can run a one time batch and include my credit cards and bank accounts, and I can say I would like to process all of the pledge payments that are due through the end of August. So anyone who signed up to be a monthly donor that has a start date that’s anywhere in this month is going to get processed, and I can tell the system to process the payments on the 15. Then when I click Preview payments, what this allows me to do is review the payments that are going to be processed on the 15th the key thing you want to pay attention to is the status column. Anything that says Ready means that the monthly giving tool believes that these payments will process successfully, and you should not have any issues processing them. Anything that says caution means that you will probably want to review the payment details that are on file, because these are payments that have failed in a previous processing they could have failed because the donor’s card is expired, or they could fail because the card was reported as stolen. If they fail a second time, the database will no longer let you process the credit card. Anything that is in a warning status means that these cards have failed twice, meaning that these will no longer go through the payment processing software. So we will need to reach out to these donors and try to get updated card information. So if you don’t want to process. Anything that is in the Caution Phase. You can uncheck anything that is set to caution. And you can go down to the bottom of the screen then and say, confirm payment. This will confirm that we’re going to process 12 payments of $467.

And we can say process now. Now, if you set this to process, let’s say on the 20th of the month, it’ll process then on the 20th of the month for you and it’s letting me know success, your pledges will be processed shortly. And we can see here in the receipt or recent batches that that batch of gifts are being processed currently, I can always go into past batches, like the batch that was processed this morning, apparently, that had eight failed transactions. And I can come into here and see the transactions that failed, and see the reason why they failed. Most times for you guys, you’ll see failed transactions are because of expired credit cards or a card that was reported lost or stolen. You rarely will see duplicate transactions because most likely, you are not using the system for testing purposes, so you probably will not have donors with duplicate transactions.

So as a review of how the payment processing solutions work, essentially, pledge records are either created manually by you and DonorPerfect. You can create them using the DP mobile device. Pledge records can be created when a donor signs up with an integrated form that can be a give cloud form, a DonorPerfect form, or an online form. All three of the sources create a pledge record in DonorPerfect, then that allows our automatic monthly giving tool to look through every single pledge record every single month, or sorry, it allows you to look at every single pledge record every single day, and it will automatically process anything that’s due on that day. When it’s looking the process, it again, sends the message to the Save save gateway, who then talks to your merchant processor. The merchant processor will approve that payment, and then that’s how you end up with your failed and your approvals. Now the difference between what happens when a gift is created through automatic monthly giving. So let me look at my successful transactions here. So Dorothy Gale had a successful pledge. Payment is when a payment is processed through Instacharge, the type of gift gets recorded as a visa Instacharge donation. So this is how we know payments processed through Instacharge is a type of gift will be card type, followed by Instacharge. Payments that are processed through automatic monthly giving will have the type of gift as card type, dash, EFT, electric, electronic fund transfer. So that’s how you can tell the difference between what did you process through Instacharge and what came through a, pardon me, automatic monthly giving tool. Automatic monthly giving will be card type dash, EFT, payments processed through Instacharge will be card type dash, Instacharge. So hopefully that also addresses the question for some folks as to why, when you click in type of gift, you might see Visa and MasterCard and American Express listed multiple times it’s to essentially track the source of where that gift was processed from. 

All righty, so then let’s talk about everybody’s least favorite topic, which is handling adjustment. Unfortunately, there are times when we need to. Void donations or we need to make adjustments to a donation that was made. So what we’re going to walk through in the next couple slides is, one, how do we report on adjustments, and secondly, how do we apply adjustments? So we always recommend if you need to void or refund a donation that you do it in DonorPerfect First, if you initiate the void or refund from within the Donor Perfect gift record that will update the gateway and force the gateway to initiate the refund or the void of the gift. So the way that that works is that when you’re in a gift record and you need to adjust or avoid a gift, you simply click on the pencil icon next to the gift amount, and it’s going to allow you to either do a adjustment, where I can take the gift from $80 down to $40 or you can void the transactions, which means you’re going to refund the full amount.

As always, we recommend if you’re doing a void or adjustment, that you leave a note in the gift memo field as to why you’re initiating the void or adjustment. So that way, we’re creating an audit trail about who did the voiding and adjustment and the reason why. And then, in terms of being able to report on your voids or adjustments, you can always run the adjusted gift report to see a list of gifts that have been voided or adjusted in your database.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to log into DonorPerfect again. We are going to go to Dorothy Gale’s gift that we process through Instacharge, trying to edit her $150 gift. So I’m going to click on the pencil icon and I’m going to do avoid so I’m going to fully refund this $150 and what I’m going to do is leave a note with the date and my initials To say voided gift to demo during the payment processing webinar, so my colleagues know why this void or adjustment was made. I’m going to void the transaction. It’s going to ask me one more time, are you sure that you want to void this? And I’m going to say yes. So my option is to void right now, because I’m applying this change within 24 hours of receiving the gift. If I needed to do this void or adjustment, let’s say two days later, it would be denoted as an adjustment, so I can still adjust it to $0 when I save my changes, what you’re going to see is the gift gets changed from a gift record type to a corrected gift Type. Corrected gifts are excluded from all financial reports because it’s now seen as we’ve refunded the full donation. I can look at and see that an adjustment or a void was done, because in the gift grid, there is a pencil icon next to this gift. If I click on the pencil icon, that will allow me to see that the original gift was $150 I applied an adjustment the same day of $150 which now leaves me with a $0 gift, or a corrected gift.

To pull the report of corrected and adjusted donations, we can go into the Reports icon in the navigation bar and go down to Report Center. In the Report Center, you can use the search bar in the top right corner of the report to search for the adjusted gifts report. In the adjusted gift reports, I can come into the sidebar filter. Okay and use the date range filter to look for adjustments that were made within a date range that you can define. So I’m going to look for adjustments made between August 1 and today’s date and then at the bottom of the sidebar, we can click the Run Report button to run the report and see the list of gifts that were adjusted. 

This is going to show me my full list of gift it sorts the gift by the date of the donation I have four pages of adjustments that were done, so I’m going to go to the last page to try to find my all of my adjustment. And here is Dorothy Gale’s adjustment, the one that we did today. What you’ll see is that the report tells us the name of the donor. It shows you the full details about the original gift that was made and the adjustment details. It’ll also include any notes that are in the gift memo field, so we can see why the adjustments were completed. So the adjusted gift report is a great way to be able to pull a report for your accountant or your finance person if they’re ever questioning, pardon me, if they’re ever questioning why the numbers that are in their bank account might differ from the numbers they pulled in the previous month. We can look at the adjustment reports to see if we did any voids or refunds. 

Alrighty. And the last thing that we’re going to be touching on today is, how can we look up data in the safe safe gateway? Your safe safe gateway is the area where your donors payment information is encrypted and stored. However, it can also be where your organization can go to see the total dollars that have been processed electronically within a date range of your choice. So you can access the gateway from within DonorPerfect, under the apps link, or you can access the gateway from Safe, safe payments.com where you can enter your username and password. The main things that we want to point out within the gateway for you guys today is, how can you run two reports so that you can look at the payments that have been successfully processed? So we’re going to go into DonorPerfect, and I’m going to show you how to log into the gateway. You can access the gateway from apps and processing gateway. 

Once you’re in the processing gateway, you’re going to come over to the left hand side of the screen, and you’re going to come down to the transaction reports. Transactions reports is where you can either run a settlement batch report or you can search for transactions using a transaction ID. The transaction snapshot report is the most common kind of report to run in the gateway, because this is going to group your donations by the settlement batch. What the settlement batch means is that is all of the donations that were successfully processed on a given day. And you can use this to reconcile the data that is in the gateway with the numbers that are in your bank account, keeping in mind that your bank account will show numbers minus processing fees, so you can set your start date and end date and click Submit, and that will allow you to then see A full list of payments broken out by the settlement date. Now for us, it’s a little difficult to show you guys, because ours is in test gateway. So what you guys will see are a list of dates, and you’ll be able to see the number of transactions that were processed the. Amount that was processed, and you’ll be able to see any refunds that were issued, as well as the dollar payments made through Amex versus Visa MasterCard, and discover if you click on the little Spyglass icon next to the settlement date, you can drill into the details and break out a particular settlement by card and payment type. So now this will tell you all of the gifts that were processed through American Express compared to the dollars processed through Visa, MasterCard, etc. Keeping in mind this is going to encompass Instacharge, reoccurring monthly giving. And those of you that are using our integration with give cloud to process payments using a give cloud form as well as payments process through a donor perfect or online form. 

If you want to look up a particular transaction in the gateway. So for example, if I want to look up the details of the transaction that I’ve now voided for Dorothy Gale, you can grab the transaction ID number from the gift record, which will also be in the reference or check number field as well. You can copy this number go into apps and processing gateway. You can come into transaction reports, and you can use the search transactions to search for a transaction using that ID, and then hit submit. 

That will show you the transaction details in the processing gateway. You could initiate a void or a refund from the gateway here, but what this does mean is that you would then have to go into Donor Perfect and also void and refund it in Donor Perfect. So again, we definitely recommend doing your voids and refunds within DonorPerfect. However, you can look up transactions in the gateway as well as issue your voids and refunds from here. So yeah.

All right. My last thing that I’ll show you in the gateway is that there are times where you might need to access the safe save Gateway ID key or safe save safe save API key. This is what allows you to link your save, save gateway to other databases for the purchasing purpose of payment processing. So for example, if you’re going to use Ready Set auction, our integrated auction software, and you want to process payments in Ready Set option using your save save gateway, that would be a use case for why you would need access to this ID field. So to access your save save API key, you come into the menu on the left hand side of the screen, come down to options and settings, and in options and settings, you’re going to locate the Security Options box to access the security keys.

Oh, thank you. Katie, that’s Loki. He is my little baby, my little husky. And from here you’re going to copy your default key, and this would be the API key you can put into Ready Set auction so that you can enable it for payment processing using the same gateway.

All righty. So with that said, we have gone over quite a bit of information. So how do you get help if you have questions? Well, if your questions are related to resetting your gateway password, you need help reconciling what’s in your bank account to what’s in the gateway. If you have questions about your billing or you need to change your bank account, you can always reach out to our safe save team. At what 800-220-8611 and they’ll be able to help you with those pieces. If your questions are summing around. You want to be able to view a statement, if you want to apply adjustments to transactions, if you need help with avoiding and refunding payments, if you need help adding a credit card to a donor payment account using Instacharge, or you just have questions about the monthly giving an online forms product, you can reach out to the DonorPerfect support team at 215-628-4343, so leave this up on the screen for just a moment, in case you would like to write down these phone numbers.

And of course, in addition to taking advantage of being able to call a live support rep, we also have several resources in our knowledge base that you can access as well, especially for someone that likes to read your instructions. So in the knowledge base, if you search for the keywords, payment processing or monthly giving. This will take you to videos in how to guides and best practices related to payment processing and automatic monthly giving. You can also, if you have any additional questions, reach out to your account manager, especially if you want to get signed up for payment processing, you can always reach out to your account manager at 1-800-848-3279, and just as a reminder, for those of you who Maybe do not know how to access the knowledge base.

The Knowledge Base is accessible from DonorPerfect within the Help icon and selecting the option knowledge base from the drop down list, once you’re in the knowledge base. That is where you can then use the search functionality to search for a keyword like payment processing. And this will bring up common articles like common payment processing error codes, how to get a payment processing account, reconciling FAQs and best practices, how to refund a transaction using the Save, save gateway. So there’s several different articles that will all get pulled up if you just use the keywords, payment processing, monthly giving or Instacharge, alrighty.

So with that said, let’s go ahead and recap what we’ve gone over for today. So with our payment processing solution, you get access to Instacharge, which provides you with an easy to use way to process gifts using DonorPerfect, essentially as your payment terminal. You can also with the payment processing solutions, get access to the monthly giving tool, which allows you a easy way to process reoccurring gifts within DonorPerfect, both automatically as well as with a manual process. In the unfortunate case where we have to adjust or void a donation, we recommend doing so from within the donors gift record, so that void gets captured in DonorPerfect and also initiates a void within the gateway and all transactions and adjustments can be viewed within the safe save gateway, and the gateway provides you an easy way to see what transactions have settled so that you have a rough idea of the dollars that will hit your bank account. You can typically expect to see credit card payments hit the bank account in one to three days, and for bank accounts, that is typically three to five days. So with that said, I want to thank you guys all for taking the time to come here and learn a bit about payment processing. I know that I moved through things relatively quickly, so we have about 10 minutes left. I’m going to stick around. If you guys have any questions, totally feel free to ask them. If you don’t have any questions, then I hope you have a great rest of your day. So I’m going to stick around. For questions. But if you don’t have any questions, you can feel free to take 10 minutes back in your day. That will be my gift to you.

All righty, I’m not seeing any questions coming in, so we’re going to end today’s webinar. I hope you guys have a great rest of your day, and I look forward to seeing you in a future session. Bye.