Enrollment contracts can still be submitted without successful deposit payments on BBMS

Julie Perry

We had to move over to BBMS from authorize.net recently. When a parent submits an enrollment contract and their deposit payment fails, either because they typed in a credit card wrong or it was returned NSF, the contract is still submitted and we don't find out until several days later that a payment returned and we have to investigate who it was, delete the contract and reissue the contract. When we were on authorize.net, the contract could not be submitted if the payment failed and this is how it should work. Please advise.

Shannon Krise

@Julie Perry Were you set up for ACH payments with authorize? In my experience, credit card payments fail immediately if incorrect information is supplied in both BBMS and authorize which results in a failed payment before the form is submitted and prevents submission. If I have an issue with a failed payment after the fact, it's an ACH payment where you can have things like an NSF return, or a typo in the bank account number which isn't caught as quickly as with credit card numbers. Those returns occur after an initial acceptance of the payment information and consequently occur after submission of the form.

We don't use authorize for contracts, but do for our auxiliary programs billing, and I have a similar issue through authorize with failed ACH payments. Actually in that case, we don't find out until month end reconciliation. It's a real nuisance and they make it difficult to turn off ACH payments once you've activated them. For Enrollment Management contracts, these failed payments also took me by surprise initially. We are using integrated contracts with Tuition Management though, so for us these failed payments don't come through BBMS and are typically taken care of by Tuition Management.

I have occasionally had a direct debit return in BBMS for other things though, and we created a school form in Enrollment Management that we could assign to the parent so that they could make a replacement payment without having to resubmit the form. In the case of enrollment deposits, I might try to create an invoice or billing item for the failed deposit through whatever platform you are using for tuition billing instead, but the Enrollment Management form has worked well for us.

You should be able to at least avoid any work finding out who the failed payment belonged to using the notifications on the BBMS Control Panel. I haven't received very many, but when I did, they included the account holder's name and transaction details for the direct debit return.