Marking a CIM transaction as recurring from an external recurring system

[jeffg]

I am using CIM and have my own recurring billing system. In addition to the recurring payments, I accept one-time transactions which also creates profile/payment profile in CIM. I am looking for a way to distinguish between the two types of payments, and for it to appear on the Authorize.Net reports. I see a recurringBilling flag when creating the transaction - is my situation the proper use of this flag or is there another way to accomplish this?

[TJPride]

When you create a transaction, you can put some additional information in the order description, or in extraOptions. You'll have to experiment a bit and see which choice is best for you, but my guess would be the latter since you can specify any name / value pair you want.

[jeffg]

How do extraOptions values appear on reports?

[jeffg]

The recurringBilling field seems to fulfill our requirements, but setting this field in addition to setting zip code the 46282 (which is supposed to decline the card) returns an accepted instead on https://apitest.authorize.net/soap/v1/Service.asmx Does anyone have experience setting recurringBIlling to true?

[TJPride]

The recurringBilling field is just a marker, I believe -it doesn't actually make it recur automatically, if that's what you were asking. As for the zip code, are you running the transactions in live mode on a sandbox account, or test mode? Test mode -may- not act the same way as live mode. You should also check your security settings in your control panel and make sure it's set to reject on incorrect zip code match.

[Trevor]

Setting the "recurringBilling" flag to true can affect how the transaction is handled at the processor.  This flag essentially tells your processor that you have an ongoing relationship with the customer and have already established their identity.  The precise result this has on the transaction can vary by processor, but one common effect is that Address Verification is no longer performed.

[TJPride]

Hmm. How would you establish their identity, exactly? Would the proper procedure be to set the first transaction to not recurring and any successive transactions to recurring? What about if their address changes? Should you always set it to not recurring just to be safe?

This seems to make things a lot more difficult.

[Trevor]

The way we treat it in our Automated Recurring Billing system is that we set the "Recurring Billing" flag to true only if the payment details have not changed since the last payment and that payment was successful. It is best to make sure that everything is verified again whenever the payment details are changing.

[TJPride]

Why wouldn't AVS bs used whenever the CIM profile updates? And if it is used, why would it need to be used again on the charge? The logic escapes me. Unless the new address might only apply to one of the associated billing methods, in which case I would think it wouldn't be enough to just mark it as not recurring on the first transaction after each address change.

[Trevor]

I think there is some misunderstanding here, becaue that is actually exactly what we do.  We disable the recurring billing flag (and therefore validate the address) for every transaction that occurs after a billing update.  We only send the recurring billing flag as true if the billing information on file has already been validated in a previous transaction.

For CIM transactions, the recurring flag always defaults to false unless you explicitly override it.