Call center Future orders and Authorization resubmit

There is a Call center specific Future order feature that will allow users to delay authorizing a customer’s credit card during the Sales order creation and payment process.  The reason behind a delay authorization may be due to back orders or extended shipping dates.  In this scenario, the system will wait to authorize the credit card tied to the sales order until a specific number of days prior to an expected shipping date. 

As an example, inventory for a Widget is not available for 30 days.  An authorization for the credit card created today would normally expire after 7 days.  This means we would attempt a new authorization while the pick/pack/shipment occurs in 30 days.  What this feature allows in this example is to configure the system to wait until 5 days prior to shipment (day 25) to authorize the credit card.  This would provide time to ensure the card is valid prior to shipment and allow for any payment corrections as needed to keep the expected delivery on schedule.

To enable this feature, we’ll need to look at the Call center parameters form under the Payments tab.  In the CREDIT CARD AUTHORIZATIONS section, you will find the setup for the Future orders processing feature.  These settings apply to Call center orders with credit card payments only.

The Future orders toggle to Yes will enable the feature and other fields on the form.

The Delay authorization toggle is to not submit the authorization for a future order if there is no reserved inventory.

The Future order days field is used to specify the number of days before an order is considered to be a future order.  

The Automatically authorize reserved is used to authorize when inventory can be reserved.

When toggled, the Retry on submit in conjunction with the Reauthorization limit are used to indicate that the system should retry submitting a declined credit card on the sales order and how many times this should be attempted before failing out.

The Reserve inventory if authorization expired will still reserve the inventory even when the credit card authorization has expired.

Once you create a new Call center Sales order, set the ship date on order header to a date that is X days in the future.  Add the lines and submit a Credit card payment, with Future orders enabled, the logic will bypass the credit card authorization step.  This will still perform other validations to properly close the sales order and should return the user to the Customer service form or Sales order.  The payment status of the Credit card will show as "not submitted" and the "do not process" flag would be set on the order - user will be allowed to exit the Sales order form.

To process the Credit card authorizations in the future, there is a Commerce job called Authorization resubmit.  This is a job is located at:  Retail and Commerce > Retail and Commerce IT > Payments > Authorization resubmit.  The intention of this job is to process Credit card authorizations that are set for future processing of which the payment lines are in a “not submitted” state.  It will also process expired, declined, or cancelled authorizations that are in conjunction with Future orders only. 

NOTE: This is NOT intended to be utilized by any other payment method for a future payment processing, nor does it apply to non-future orders paid via credit card.

On this form, the Days out field would be configured with a value of how many days prior to shipping should the card be authorized.  For instance, if the Sales order had a Requested ship date of May 25 and you configured this for 5 days.  Then this reoccurring job would pick up this sales order on May 20^th to authorize the card on file.

The other fields on this form can be toggled based on the business preference for handling authorizations.

This job should be configured as a recurrence.  Normally you would only need to process this once a day to pick up any orders that are within the “Days out” shipment threshold.  If you are also looking to retry failed authorizations, you may look to process this a few times a day as necessary.  Those orders that are identified have the Credit cards on file authorized prior to picking/packing/shipment.  Provided the orders are authorized a few days prior to the expected shipment date, any issues with the authorizations can be sorted out before the items are processed.