Card Pre-Authorization
Pre-authorized transactions are only valid for 7 days. This time frame is controlled by the individual payment portals, and subject to change without notice. It’s always best to check directly with your payment provider for the most up-to-date information.
If you're a Square or Stripe user you have the option to ask your clients to provide their credit card information for payment pre-authorization at the time of booking. This is helpful if you want to manually charge clients after their appointment have taken place or if you plan on charging them using a different payment method (mobile payments, checks, cash, etc.) but would like to have a guarantee that the clients have funds available. In this page we'll cover how to:
For the following example we'll assume that we run a massage therapy clinic. We want to give patients the option to pay for their appointment using electronic mobile payments (Venmo, Cash App), cash, personal check, etc. However, to ensure that the cost of the appointment will be paid, we'll ask clients to provide a credit card at time of booking, TimeTap will pre-authorize the amount of the appointment, and when the appointment has taken place we can ask patients if they'd like to pay using the card they provided at the time of booking or any of the payment methods I mentioned previously.
We'll begin by going to the profile of the service for which we would like to pre-authorize the price of the appointment. Payment pre-authorization is made at the service level, this means that you must enable this feature for every service for which you would like to pre-authorize payment at the time of booking.
Once in the service profile, click the Payments tab, then click the Edit button in the Payments section, and check the "Require Card Pre-Authorization for Service" checkbox:
Now that we enabled payment authorization for the service Therapeutic Massage, we should determine whether we want to make this step optional required:
If payment pre-authorization is optional: Clients will be able to schedule an appointment and providing a card for payment pre-authorization will be optional, no card will be on file to charge invoice later if clients chooses to skip this step. To make this step optional, we'll leave "Require Payment for Service" unchecked.
If payment pre-authorization is required: Clients will be able to schedule an appointment but before the appointment is confirmed, they must provide a card for payment pre-authorization. Clients will have 90 minutes after they schedule an appointment to provide a card for pre-authorization in order to avoid having TimeTap cancel the appointment because their card information was not provided. To make this step required, we'll check the "Require Payment for Service" option.
For our example we'll make the payment pre-authorization a required step, for this we'll check the "Require Payment for Service" box and Save our changes:
Next, we want to make sure clients are aware that they're not being charged when they provide their credit card information, we'll add a message that reflects this under Messaging → Payment Settings → Payment Authorization Only Title and Payment Authorization Only Message. In this case, I chose to label the payment panel title "Payment Pre-Authorization" and the message is set to "In order to secure your appointment, please enter your credit card for authorization purposes only. Once your booking is reviewed, we will follow up with you to draft the payment through your preferred method.":
In the section below we'll cover how clients will be able to enter their credit card at the end of the booking process for payment pre-authorization.
In this section we'll cover what clients see when they schedule an payment authorization is required or optional.
We'll begin with the scheduling flow when payment pre-authorization is required (refer to setup example in previous section). Our service Therapeutic Massage has payment pre-authorization enabled (1) and checking the "Require Payment for Service" box we made this step required (2):
Our client Yolanda Doe has gone through the scheduler and chosen to schedule an appointment for the service Therapeutic Massage, after she enters her information she click the Save button:
Because payment pre-authorization is a required step Yolanda's appointment is put in a "Pending - Awaiting Payment" status, this means that Yolanda must enter her credit information for pre-authorization before her appointment is completely scheduled. The client will have 90 minutes from the Save button was clicked to provide her card information or TimeTap will automatically the appointment:
After the client clicks the Save button, she will be presented with the message we entered in the "Payment Authorization Only Message" section within the Payment Settings (see last part of previous section for reference). In this panel Yolanda can click the Pay Now button to continue to the next screen where she will have the option to provide her credit card information:
In the Square payment portal the client will enter their credit card information and click the Authorize button. (For the sake of this example the price of the service has been changed to $1, in a normal pre-authorization the amount to be authorized is the one entered in the service's profile → Payments → Service Price). Keep in mind that the credit card information entered here is not stored in TimeTap, it's store and processed by your payment processor you setup:
After the Authorize button is clicked and the pre-authorization is processed successfully, the client is redirected to an Invoice panel where they can print their invoice (1), Pressing the Pay Now button in this panel will not allow the client to pay, but to only enter their credit card for pre-authorization (2):
Now, if we locate Yolanda's appointment in the backoffice we'll notice that her appointment's status is now set to Open and an email confirmation was sent to her:
If we choose to view the appointment's invoice within the Invoice tab, we'll notice that the status of said invoice is set to "Open - Authorize". This status indicates that there's a pre-authorization in this invoice:
Now we'll cover the scheduling flow when payment pre-authorization is optional (refer to setup example in previous section). This means that clients will be able to schedule an appointment without the need to provide a credit card for payment pre-authorization.
Our service Therapeutic Massage has payment pre-authorization enabled (1), we'll leave the "Require Payment for Service" option unchecked as to not make payment pre-authorization required (2):
Our client Peter Doe has gone to the scheduler and chosen to schedule a Therapeutic Massage appointment, after he enters his information he clicks the Save button:
Because payment pre-authorization is not a required, Peter's appointment is confirmed via email and put in an "Open" status, this mean that Peter's appointment is added to our calendar:
The invoice for this appointment will have a status of "Open - No Payment":
After Peter clicks the Save button, he will be presented with the message we entered in the "Payment Authorization Only Message" section within the Payment Settings (see last part of previous section for reference). In this panel our client can click the Pay Now button to continue to the next screen where he'll have the option to provide his credit card information: