Recurring Gift with Blackbaud Checkout (How are charges made?)

Nick Johannsen

We have set up a process to Create a membership and recurring gift for the membership using the sky API (Both Raiser edge and Payment endpoints). This is all set up and working but has one issue that I need to solve. The card gets authorized for the membership payment but then get authorized a 2nd time and that authorization is the one that gets used when the payment goes through.

Process:

Users come to our website and select join now. We have connected our signup form to the Blackbaud checkout using the configuration found using the Payment configuration list Endpoint to get info. We create a Guid to tokenized the card with and pass it to transactiondata.card_token. We get back a Transaction_Id and pass that along with the tokenized card ID to the rest of the process.

All the information we collect get passed to system that use SKY API. It attempt find or it creates a constituent. Then it creates the recurring gift. The transaction id get put into 2 different fields for the gift: checkout_transaction_Id and bbps_transaction_id. We put the tokenized card id into account_token. The start date on the gift is the date of processing.

My first guess is that the recurring gift can't use the transaction ID to charge the first payment. And that I will need to checkout the payment my self with the ski API and make a gift payment via the API with the transaction information.

Does anyone know how the whole process works. Can you use an authorization through a gift to make the first charge? Appreciate any thought on the subject. Thank you.


Additional Question:
What is the difference between Checkout Transaction and Transaction Capture?

Mina Mistry

Hi @Nick Johannsen

Thanks for posting, I can help you with these questions.

Is the desired workflow for you to charge the first payment immediately and then add the recurring gift to NXT for all future payments? This is possible by using Blackbaud Checkout to process that first payment. Then you'd add the recurring gift to NXT using the account_token field as you have described.

If you are using Checkout, you should use the Checkout Transaction endpoint to capture that transaction. The Transaction Capture endpoint is only for cases where Checkout is not used.

If you want to only save the payment method using Checkout and not process the first payment immediately, Checkout has a Store Card mode that you can also use. See here for details.

We recorded a demo that walks through making a payment via Checkout and then adding that as a recurring gift to RE NXT via the Gift API, and it talks about the various options on how gifts are added to RE NXT. You can see that in the video linked below starting at 35:20s.

Let me know if you have any further questions once you've seen the video.

Thanks

Mina