[freeside] AuthorizeNet Test mode and transaction key use

[Gerald V. Livingston II]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 12:13:42 -0800 ivan wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 03:52:39PM -0600, Gerald V. Livingston II wrote:
> > They have a bad habit of making mandatory changes with no more than a
> > 30 day window for updating existing systems.
> 
> This hasn't been my experience.  I think they tend to leave the "ADC
> direct connect" service that B:OP:AuthorizeNet uses mostly alone (or
> whatever they're calling it these days - the pure backoffice service
> that doesn't involve the user's browser).

I guess I'm just jumpy because in 4 years of dealing with them the one
major, sweeping, change that they did make was with short notice and it
affected my sleep patterns for months afterward <grin>.

I'm suddenly in "but my butt" mode working with the Freeside install that
I've been toying with for 2 years because our legacy system just snagged an
$80 credit from one account and applied it to 36 OTHER accounts -- $10 at
a time for a $420 loss for us if we hadn't had a customer email us asking
why he wasn't charged. We would have lost the $360 applied to accounts that
never got paid and we have had to reinstate the $80 credit to the account
that was depleted.

How the system managed to apply $360 worth of payments based on a $80
credit balance is beyond us. And the system does many "odd" things like
this at seemingly random times. Doesn't bill active accounts for months at
a time then suddenly bills them all at once == irate customers who were
expecting to pay $10/month get upset when they see 6 or 8 $10 charges all
at once.

It's a windows based system using "FileMaker Pro" as the backend and we
suspect database corruption (and a poorly written frontend that worked OK
for 500 customers, but not for 5000).

We are a small company and that $420 loss would actually have hurt pretty
bad. And we have no idea what else we may be losing because the reports
available from the legacy system suck.

Anyway, I'm ranting again. I tend to do that when using email as a break
from "real work". Thanks for the reply Ivan.

Gerald