Declined and cancelled Transactions

[HGIC]

Transactions that are listed as declined....are these all items where sales were made in offline status and then declined or do these include declines at point of sale when online?

What is a cancelled transaction status?

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @HGIC.  If you go to your dashboard -> Reports -> Transaction Status Report, then press the little blue ? In the upper right corner, you will get the screen I am including below.  It has explanations for all transaction statutes.  To expand a little bit, declinations are only declinations that Visa/MC/Amex pass on from the customer’s card-issuing bank — whether for NSF, or closed account, or whatever.  These are actual decisions made my a computer algorithm.  Some of those could be offline sales that were later declined by the bank, but that’s one of the risks we take for offline sales, and it’s why Square gives us the ability to set a maximum amount we are willing to risk to take sales when we are offline.

Offline sales that are never actually processed get the status Expired.

Cancelled usually means that a transaction was started but the process was not completed.  There are lots of reasons for this, but the end result is that an authorization was most likely not issued.  This will happen, also, if you get an authorization but don’t end up processing the transaction for whatever reason — the pre-authorization is effectively cancelled.

I hope that helps.

[HGIC]

I am getting emails for failed offline transaction but the transaction report show no expired just declined and cancelled

Thanks for your help

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

@HGIC That’s interesting.  I’d recommend calling Square Customer Success, so that they can look into the specifics of transactions.  Given that you have the emails, they should be able to give you much more information than we can, since it would involve account sensitive information.

Good luck!