Transactions

The Transactions tab contains everything about your transactions, options to execute new transactions, or refunds, the Analytics area, the possibility to download exports and more. The Transactions area itself is divided into sub-areas.

This chapter will give you an overview over everything you need to know about this Area.

Journal

The Journal is one of the most important areas inside the Backoffice. It shows your recent transactions, their status and more.

This is your basic Journal, currently showing the last 30 days of activity on your account, as shown in the top left.

Note, that there are two types of transactions:

Debits: Indicated by a green symbol
Credits (Refunds): Indicated by a red symbol

A transaction can have 4 states:

Pending/Reservation: The transaction was successful, the amount has been reserved for you, but will not be transferred, until the transaction is captured.
- Note, that a transaction cannot stay on reservation indefinitely! While Saferpay allows the capturing at any date, the card holder's bank may release the reserved amount, after a certain time frame. Guarantee are 10 days. Make sure, that all transactions are captured, until then.
Partial Capture: The transaction has partially captured, meaning parts of a transaction amount will be transferred, while the rest stays reserved.
Transaction Completed: The transaction is completed and the money will be transferred.
Transaction discarded: The transaction has been cancelled.

Customizing the Journal Page

The view of the journal can be customized, by clicking on the menu-dropdown, to the very right of the search.

With this menu, you can add, or remove certain columns to your own liking. The configuration will be saved for your account, so on the next login, it will look the same way, you have left it.

Search

Normally, the Journal shows you the last 30 days of activity on your account and so does the search only search through the last 30 days of activity. That however can be changed, by clicking on the advanced search icon, to the right of the looking-glass, which will expand the advanced search menu.

This menu will give you a more precise control over what you are looking for, like only authorizations, or Debits, Partial Captures, certain Amount ranges, time periods, currencies, providers aka Payment Methods, Terminals and more.

The Search fields also accept wildcards, like _ for a single and % for multiple characters, if you want to search for a value, that has a certain format, like the Reference number.

The Reference Number is also called Payment.OrderId on API, level. This parameter is set by your shop and then sent to Saferpay, so you may cross reference and identify certain orders, via the search.

Furthermore, this value will also show up on your reconciliation files and your customers bank statement.

If this column is empty, then no value has been given. While it isn't mandatory, we highly recommend using it, for the mentioned benefits!

Capturing or Cancelling in Batches

The Journal-view allows you to capture or cancel transactions in bulk. This is helpful, if your shop has a technical problem and it was unable to execute the capture, or if you simply want to manually review your transactions.

What is a Capture?

Certain payment methods, like credit cards, go through a two-step transaction process. First, a card is simply authorized, meaning, that Saferpay asks the card holder's bank, if the desired amount is available on the card holder's card. If so, the amount gets blocked/reserved for the merchant and the bank replies with a success-message. The transaction will then be in the state Authorization (Debit), as you can see in the screenshots further above and below. It is then in this "waiting state", so you may claim the amount and that is, what the Capture does. Once captured, the amount will be transferred from the card holder's bank account, to your acquirer and the transaction will have the status Payment (Debit). However note, that the payout to your bank account, will not happen, until the batch close for that particular transaction has been executed, however that depends on the given Payment Method. However most payment methods, that do need a capture, also need a batch close.

Authorizations are not valid indefinitely! The exact time-frame depends on the card hodlers bank, however a minimum of 10 days can be guaranteed. Please make sure, that you capture your transactions within this time-frame.

What is a Cancel and what is the difference to a Refund?

The cancel is distinctively different to a refund and this difference is important to understand, when handling with customer returns and canceled orders. So what is the difference between those two?

The main difference between them is, when they are executed in the transaction process. A Cancel can only be executed, if a Capture and thus the money-flow has not been executed yet. So what is done here is simply, that the reserved amount is released, indicating, that you no longer want to claim the given amount from your customers bank account.

A refund however is executed, if the customer has already been charged. The money is transferred back, from your, to your customers bank account. So a Refund really is a new type of transaction, just in the opposite direction and as such, it is also charged as a new transaction, while a cancel is not.

Refunds specifically cannot be executed in a batch and must be executed through the previously made transaction.

Executing the batch

The Journal also allows you, to directly capture, or cancel a whole batch of transactions. You can either click the little box on the left side of a transaction row, or select all transactions, by clicking on the box at the top of the column. At the bottom left, you can then see the option to either Capture, or cancel.

This opens up a window, that asks you to either confirm, or cancel this action.

A Capture, or Cancel cannot be undone! Please make sure, that you really want to execute this action, for these transactions.

Export

You can also choose to export your transactions, by clicking on the export-symbol, next to the search.

The data-format and structure may change at any time, without prior notice.

Due to that, we do not recommend to use this export for any kind of import/machine processing!

Always use the Payment-API for such cases, or transfer data between your systems, that have this data.

The export is limited to 100'000 transactions!

This export uses the filters, you have specified in your search. So if you want to export just a specific part of your transactions, you can do so, by first applying filters and executing a search. The export will then only save the transactions found within that search.