Processing Payments

When a donor provides his credit card or bank account information, the charity may process the gift or payment using the Control Panel's virtural terminal --sometimes refered to as in-house processing.

To access the Control Panel's virutral terminal, go to "Process a Payment" (see Figure 1) from the main menu.

If the organization has more than one payment form, select the appropriate form from the drop-down list (see Figure 2) then complete the transaction.

When processing in-house payments your initial reaction may be to use the payment form located on your web site. RESIST!

Here's why:

• Part of our security protocol is to block a user (donor, charity, hacker, etc.) after two failed attempts. These failures are cumulative by IP address. The last failed attempt could have been yesterday or two years ago. Once the system sees two failed attempts to complete any transaction, the user will be blocked from further use. By using the Control Panel's virtural terminal, failed attempts will not be accumulated and the charity will not be blocked.

• The virtural terminal bypasses some of the requirements of the public form located on your web site. For instance, the donor's billing zip is not verified for accuracy, the card security code is not required, and the CAPTCHA is not activated. You will still be required to input data into those fields, but it is not verified for accuracy in the back-end processing. Again this will/may eliminate some failed attempts and being blocked from access. It also means you can process the gift even if the donor failes to provide all of the required information.

A user much be assigned as an Administrator in order to use the Process A Payment virtural terminal.