Auth_Only + Capture/Void vs AuthCaputure with Refund

[phampton24]

I have a project where at a high level I want to validate the credit card information a user entered.  If the card is valid then I'll perform some processing, then assuming the processing is successful charge the card that was validated in the first step.  I see two ways to go about this, but wanted to get community feedback on which way is best

Option1

• Authorize the card 
• If card is valid do processing
• If processing succeeds, Capture payment for the transacton
• If processing fails, Void the transaction

Option 2

• Authorize the card and Capture payment in one action
• If payment is caputred, do processing
• If processing succeeds, we're done
• If processing failes issue a refund

In either case the time necessary to "do processing" is minimal as in sub second.  

Two specific question I have are:

1. Is there a difference in the number of billable transactions in either option?  Put another way is an Auth_Only followed by Capture/Void two billable transactions?
2. With option 2 is there a timing issue if the time between Capture and Fefund is to short?

Any other feedback or insight is appreciated.

[phampton24 · Accepted solution]

I ended up doing some of my own experimentation and had communications with a merchant account rep to come to a conclusion.  For others looking to answer the same question here's what I decided.

For the following reasons I chose to implement Option 1

1. More customer friendly because we don't capture payment until we know everything else has processed successfully.
2. There is a timing issue with issuing a refund.  If the payment is captured, but not settled you have to void, but if it is captured and settled you have to issue a refund.
3. Auth+Caputure followed by a Void/Refund is a second billable transaction.

[joelmartin82]

What did you find regarding the timeframes of an auth_only+void vs auth_capt + refund?

We have a situation where a customer is billing time, so we want to initially Auth_Only a certain amount, but if the job exceeds that, we want to void the original Auth_Only and submit a new Auth_only for a new amount. The problem were faced with asking is will this procedure tie up unnesseccary amounts of funds on the customers accounts to where they can't, or even we cant, run their cards. Or, once the processor receives the void that those funds will be released immediately to where we can submit a new Auth_Only and not run into any issues.