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About Transaction Categories

Transaction Categories are the types of payments you want to collect.

Examples include ... 

Reservation Deposit
Check-Out Settlement
Group Deposit
Gift Card
Lost & Found Fee

These can be anything you wish to call them.

If TransForm is interfaced to your PMS, you can configure any or all of your Transaction Categories to post to a reservation, to the master account for a group, or to any other specified account in the PMS.

Accessing Transaction Categories

To create or edit Transaction Categories, log into the b4 Admin Site and select TRANSFORM in the banner menu. Transaction Categories are in the first button under TRANSFORM.

Once you select the Transaction Categories button, you will see a table similar to the example below.

There is a button in the blue bar that enables you to add a new Transaction Category. Each existing Transaction Category includes a pencil icon that enables you to edit its details.

Transaction Category Settings

After you select either the button to Add a New Transaction Category or the edit pencil for an existing Transaction Category, the settings page opens.

The first section of the setup page for Transaction Categories includes the following settings:

1. IS ACTIVE
   This check-box controls whether the Transaction Category is available to be selected on the payment page. Unchecking this box hides the option from use.
   

2. SHOW ON PAYMENT PAGE
   This check-box controls whether the Transaction Category is visible on your TransForm URL (payment page). Turn this feature on if you are not sending Transform Mailers and sending your TransForm URL directly to customer.
   

3. SORT ORDER
   Enter a number to control the order in which the Transaction Categories should be listed in the drop-down on the payment page.
   

4. FEE TYPE
   Specify a fee that should be added, if any. You can configure a flat fee per submission or a percentage of the amount as the fee.
   

5. FIELD SELECTOR
   The field selector lets you control which fields are to display on the payment page for this Transaction Category, and whether each field is to be mandatory or not. (You are not yet able to control the order or position of the fields on the page.)
    

6. PMS VALIDATION AND POSTING TYPE
   This field only appears if TransForm is interfaced to your PMS. The drop-down will contain the revenue categories available to associate with your Transaction Category.
   

7. POSTS TO
   Appearing if interfaced, this field enables you to specify an account to which the revenue for this Transaction Cateogory is to be posted. Your PMS might refer to these as Posting Master accounts or as PERM accounts.
   

8. FAILURE LIMIT
   To deter fraudulent activity, set a limit to how many times a user can try to submit using invalid personal data before their payment link becomes disabled. We recommend 3, 4 or 5 times at most.
   

Posting to a specific folio/window - OPERA users only

This feature is seen by Opera users only and works only with in-house reservations.

Please use caution when collecting online 3rd party payments within 3 days of arrival as those carry a higher fraud risk. If you have a Lead Time Restriction set on the transaction category, in-house payments will not work. Refer to ourbest practices guide for more fraud prevention suggestions.

In the transaction category set up, OPERA users only will see the folio/window selection within the POST TO field as shown below. This gives you the option to select a default folio/window to which this transaction category will post for in-house reservations.

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In addition to setting the default folio/window, you will also be able to override this default on each individual payment request email you create in TRANSFORM → TRANSFORM MAILER

This feature does not work for future dated (not checked in) reservations, as multiple folios/windows are not available until after check-in. If you chose the payment to move to window 2 before arrival, the payment will continue to post initially in the deposit area of the reservation. You can, however, use the routing rules in OPERA to have the TransForm payment move onto your desired folio/window upon the guests arrival.

Best practice for this feature is to set up a transaction category specifically for in-house payments with the desired folio selected. Some examples of use cases are accounting teams settling post masters or front office teams using this to collect lost and found payments or extending an existing stay.

Transaction Types

Each Transaction Category is assigned a type. The Transaction Type determines what type of details are asked for during the payment.

You can require payments which are processed immediately and/or authorizations for specified charges to be incurred during the stay and which the cardholder is confirming they will cover on the card they are providing.

You must assign one of four types to each Transaction Category:

1. PAYMENT/DEPOSIT only

This type presents an immediately processed payment as the only option.

2. AUTHORIZATION only

This type only asks what will be covered, for manual processing at a later time.

USAGE NOTE: This type is recommended for use ONLY where interfaced to the OPERA PMS, as a method to collect card details and confirm card validity. This transaction type authorizes the amount, which verifies the validity of the card, and then automatically voids the authorization so that the amount is not held longer than necessary to simply check the card validity. If your OPERA PMS uses tokenization, a token for the card is created. If you are not using tokenization, the masked card appears OPERA's normal card field.

Note: If you select the option to 'send credit card to OPERA', you would normally also include 'auto void'.

3. CHOICE of PAYMENT/DEPOSIT or AUTHORIZATION

This type lets the payer choose to either pay now or to specify what charge types you many process manually at a later time.

Note: If you select the option to 'send credit card to OPERA', you would normally also include 'auto void'.

4. PAYMENT/DEPOSIT with AUTHORIZATION

This type asks the payer both for an amount to be charged now as well as authorizations to be processed manually at a later time.

You can specify if the authorizations are optional or must be included, using the "require both" check-box.

You can specify if an amount limit field is to be included, and whether it is to be mandatory.

You can also specify if the option 'unlimited' is to be presented with the amount limit or not.

Charge Types

This is where you create what check-boxes are to appear for specifying the types of charges your payer can authorize you to process on the card manually at a later time.

Once you have added a Charge Type, it cannot currently be deleted - only de-activated.

These check-boxes are presented in two alternating columns. You can control the relative position of the Charge Types by manipulating the Sort Order. You can use the Active column to disable selected Charge Types.

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