Managing Credit Cards During Account Creation

Charging Customers at Account Creation

By default, BRM charges for purchase fees and the first cycle forward fees at account creation. When a customer creates an account, BRM uses the credit card processor to authorize the payment for the fees. The next time you run billing, the pin_deposit_cc billing utility deposits the credit card payment. (You should run the pin_deposit_cc utility as part of the pin_bill_day script. See "About the Billing Utilities" in BRM Configuring and Running Billing).

The total due amount for the account is charged immediately and the payment is allocated immediately to all open bill items. Therefore, after the account is created, it will have no pending amount due and no unapplied payments.

To determine how to charge customers at account creation:

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).
Change the value of the -fm_pymt_pol cc_collect entry:
- To enable credit card collection, enter 1.
- To disable credit card collection, enter 0.
Save the file.

You do not need to restart the CM to enable this entry.

Use the PCM_OP_PYMT_POL_SPEC_COLLECT policy opcode to customize whether to charge the customer immediately for all or part of the current account balances during account creation or to defer the charges to a later date. You can also specify whether to validate the charges. See "Customizing Account Creation Charges" in BRM Opcode Guide.

Which Fees Are Charged at Account Creation

Only fees for charge offers that are purchased as part of the account creation process are charged and billed immediately. All other charge offer fees, even for those charge offers purchased the same day as account creation, are charged in the first billing cycle. For example, if a customer creates an account and then purchases an additional charge offer an hour later, the additional purchase fee is charged at the end of the current billing cycle.

How General Ledger Revenue Is Reported for Account Creation Charges

Even though charges collected at account creation have been paid, the BRM general ledger (G/L) interface categorizes those charges as unbilled revenue until the first billing cycle.

Validating Credit Cards at Account Creation

By default, BRM validates credit cards by checking the customer's name and address and the credit card number. You might want to turn validation off if the connection to the credit card processor is offline.

A customer can create an account even when:

The credit card transaction processing service is unavailable.
The ZIP code is valid but the street address is wrong.

By default, a customer cannot create an account if:

The wrong ZIP code was entered.
The credit card is not valid.
The address was not entered or could not be read by the credit card processor.

Note:

If an account is created without validating the credit card, the account will not be charged for any fees when it is created.

To enable or disable credit card validation, do the following:

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).
Change the value of the cc_validate entry:
- To enable credit card validation, enter 1.
- To disable credit card validation, enter 0.
Save the file.

You do not need to restart the CM to enable this entry.

Avoiding Credit Card Revalidation

You can specify the credit card revalidation interval. For example, you can allow an interval of one hour before a credit card needs to be revalidated. This reduces the cost of credit card validations and allows customers who use the same credit card to create multiple accounts without having to validate the credit card more than once.

To specify the credit card revalidation interval:

Open the CM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf).
Change the value of the cc_revalidation_interval entry. The default is 3600 seconds (one hour).
Save the file.

You do not need to restart the CM to enable this entry.

Allowing Account Creation without a Credit Card

You can allow your customers to create accounts and sign up for services without providing a credit card number when they create an account. This means that you can offer your customers a number of free days of service before they have to provide a credit card number.

To implement this feature, create the accounts by using the Undefined payment method. You can change the payment method to credit card or invoice after the free period has ended. You can also use the PCM_OP_CUST_SET_BILLINFO opcode to set the payment method. See BRM Opcode Guide.

Increasing Account Creation Speed When Paymentech Is Offline

If you know that your connection to Paymentech will be offline, you can speed up account creation by not allowing timeouts. Instead, a connection to Paymentech results in a “no answer" error immediately. By default, account creation can occur even though there is a “no answer" error. Also, a “no answer" error does not create checkpoint records, so you do not have to resolve the transaction.

Note:

If you use this option, you cannot process credit card transactions by using the pin_collect or pin_deposit utilities. You must wait and run billing when the Paymentech connection is restored.
If the credit card payment service is not available and you still want to create accounts, you must isolate those accounts for later credit card authorization. Modify the PCM_OP_PYMT_POL_VALIDATE policy source file either to save a list of permissive account creation or to send email to the system administrator. Alternatively, you can write a simple application to periodically check accounts and flag the accounts that have been created without verification.

Open the Paymentech DM configuration file (BRM_home/sys/dm_fusa/pin.conf).
Edit the online_proto entry:
- Enter linkdown to disable timeouts and report “no answer" for all connections.
- Enter socket to enable the connection to function normally.
Edit the batch_proto entry:
- Enter linkdown to disable timeouts and report “no answer" for all connections.
- Enter socket to enable the connection to function normally.
Save the file.
Stop and restart the Paymentech DM.

Specifying the Account That Records Credit Card Validations

To validate credit cards, BRM needs an account. By default, BRM logs credit card validations against the root account during account creation.

If you want to use a different account, do the following:

Open the Connection Manager (CM) configuration file (BRM_home/sys/cm/pin.conf). BRM_home is the directory in which the BRM server software is installed.
Change the account number in the following entry:
```
- fm_pymt_pol validate_acct database_number /account 1 
```
where database_number is the database number of the BRM database; by default, this is 0.0.0.1.
Save the file.

You do not need to restart the CM to enable this entry.

To customize this feature, use the PCM_OP_PYMT_POL_SPEC_VALIDATE policy opcode. See "Validating Credit Card and Direct Debit Transactions" in BRM Opcode Guide.