Lag Time for Taking Payments

Sage/Paya Processing Issues

Through our open marketplace, SiteLink integrates with a number of technology partners to provide our customers a choice in who you use for various services.  One of those partners, Paya (who is the payment processing platform behind SBOA Merchant Services), recently experienced issues with their platform that resulted in timeouts and delays in processing credit card transactions.

These outages began on December 1st, and Paya is actively working to identify and correct the problem.  You can follow live updates on the specific details of the issue on the Paya website here:

<a href="https://support.paya.com/44510-knowledgebase/308786" title="Link: https://support.paya.com/44510-knowledgebase/308786">https://support.paya.com/44510-knowledgebase/308786</a> 

In our SiteLink software, these Paya outages may have resulted in duplicate transactions to your tenants’ personal credit cards. We regret the inconvenience this situation has caused you.

We are attaching a memo that you can utilize to help your tenants understand that this is a result of an error outside your control with the payment provider, Paya.

Impact:

As payments are processed from Sitelink Web Edition, website, call center, auto billing, etc, some of your tenants may be potentially charged multiple times due to Paya’s latency in sending an approval response.

This results in the payment not being saved to the tenant record and still showing due. An error message is displayed with a corrective action when this occurs: 

“CC Processor Error: No response returned from SBOA, please check Virtual Terminal to ensure transaction processed".

As a result, tenants may incur late fees even though the credit card was processed on the Virtual Terminal if not corrected prior to the late fee date. 

We have noticed that in some cases, the manager processed the card again without checking the Virtual Terminal transaction status as suggested in the error message above. Most likely, the transaction completed and the tenant will show paid in SiteLink, but was actually charged two or more times at the processor level due to the earlier timeout.

Please note the latency issue causing the timeout is not persistent and may only impact a few transactions at your facility.

Here are the recommended actions to address and prevent new occurrences:

For New Transactions:

If managers receive the error "Msg: CC Processor Error: No response returned from SBOA, please check Virtual Terminal to ensure transaction processed", STOP and do not process the card again. 

• Check the Virtual Terminal to verify the transaction and then proceed with an offline payment if the transaction was approved. 

• How to process an offline credit card transaction.

• If managers do not have access to the Virtual Terminal, please direct them to contact a manager or owner. 

For Previous Transactions:

First you need to determine which tenants if any that could have a duplicate payment. 

• Option One: Reconcile your Virtual Terminal Credit Card Daily Report and SiteLink Credit Card Payment Daily Report. 

• Option Two: Run the Calls and Notes report located in SiteLink under Reports. Once you run the report, export the report to excel and search for the following note: 

"Msg: CC Processor Error: No response returned from SBOA, please check Virtual Terminal to ensure transaction processed".

Any tenant with the note above could be impacted. Check you Virtual Terminal to confirm if there was a single or duplicate payments.

Actions to take: 

• You will need to refund any duplicate payments that you discover in Paya.

• For transactions only in the Virtual Terminal, you will need to record these into SiteLink Web Edition as an offline payment.