How Do I Investigate Under Review Payments?

This article will walk you through how to accept or void under review payments from Authorize.net.

Authorize.net includes a Fraud Protection Suite that marks certain payments as "under review". If no action is taken these payments will eventually be voided which will leave your registrations and merchandise orders with no valid payments attached to them. This can be prevented by accepting these under review payments in your authorize.net admin dashboard and your EventConnect Event Owner dashboard. Note that, in the interest of accuracy, the EventConnect system does not include "under review" payments in any revenue calculations.

Authorize.net Admin Dashboard

The first step in dealing with "under review" transactions is to accept them in your authorize.net admin dashboard. From the homepage, go to the Advanced Fraud Detection Suite. Note that if this is your first time in the suite it may prompt you to enable it. The Fraud Detection Suite runs using its defaults even if you have not enabled it. You must enable the Suite to be able to accept "under review" transactions.

On the Fraud Detection Suite page under review, transactions are listed under the "Suspicious Transaction Reports" heading. The authorization status of each transaction depends on your Fraud Detection Suite settings (discussed below). Keep in mind that "authorized" is different from "accepted". *All transactions that are pending review will be declined if no action is taken.

When viewing the "under review" transactions, you can use the checkboxes to select transactions and either approve or void them using the buttons to the right. In our experience, many transactions are marked as suspicious because they are in excess of Authorize.net's conservative threshold for transaction totals (see Adjusting Fraud Protection Settings). You should be safe to accept any transactions that seem tied to a registration or merchandise report in your EventConnect Event Owner Dashboard.

Keep track of which transactions you approve and void as you will need to mark them as approved or voided in your EventConnect Event Owner Dashboard as well.

EventConnect Event Owner Dashboard

Registrations and merchandise orders associated with "under review" payments are marked throughout the Event Owner Dashboard. To get a quick overview of registrations with "under review" payments, use the "Payment Under Review" preset on the Registrations Report.

As previously mentioned, when you approve or void a transaction in the authorize.net dashboard, you must make the same change in your Event Owner Dashboard. You can mark transactions as approved or voided in the Payments Report. Note that "under review" transactions are marked with an amber warning sign.

Clicking on the arrow beside the warning symbol will open the transaction breakdown revealing buttons to either approve or void the transaction. Make the same choice you made for the given transaction in the authorize.net dashboard.

Adjusting Fraud Protection Settings

You can prevent future transactions from being marked as "under review" by editing your Fraud Protection Suite settings in Authorize.net. As mentioned above, many legitimate transactions are marked as "under review" because their total is above the default limit for the Fraud Protection Suite. Increasing this limit will let your Authorize.net transactions process as normal without any additional action being required.

To adjust the transaction limit, navigate to the Fraud Detection Suite homepage and click on the "Amount Filter".

In the amount filter settings, we recommend setting the "Upper Limit" to a value higher than what most of your participants spend in one transaction. The radio buttons below the limits define what authorize.net does in response to the filter being triggered. We recommend "Process as normal" or "Authorize and hold for review". Choosing "Process as normal" will ensure that no transaction is marked as "under review" even if it is above the "Upper Limit", sending you a warning instead. Choosing "Authorize and hold for review" will let your participants complete their transaction even if they violate the total limits but mark the transaction as "under review". This means you will need to complete the workflow to approve "under review" transactions described above for any transaction that exceeds the "Upper Limit". Be sure to save your changes.