Uncharged Orders Explained

What causes an Uncharged Order? 

Uncharged orders typically arise when a temporary outage with a payment processor occurs. Occasionally, the capture may fail when attempting to finalize a charge after its initial authorization.

For an explanation of how authorizations and captures work,

Please visit this related article: How Credit Card Payments Work

Another cause of a failed capture can be specific to a credit card, where something about the card itself is preventing the charge from going through. For instance, the customer may have canceled the original authorization directly with their credit card issuer. Or perhaps they exceeded their limit sometime between when they placed their order and when you attempted to close the order and charge their card. This happens most often with catering orders as customers are often ordering days or weeks in advance.

Where can I find Uncharged Orders in Direct Ordering Admin Panel?

On the rare occasion an Uncharged Order does occur, it will appear on the Uncharged Orders page in your Admin Panel:

How do I ensure relevant team members are notified of Uncharged Orders?

In Direct Ordering Ordering, an Uncharged Order is considered in the "Notification" category when it comes to internal email communications. These notifications can be set at a Brand and/or Store level. 

Please visit this related article: Setting up Operations Notification emails at a Brand & Store Level

What happens in my restaurant when there is an uncharged Order?

It is important to note that our system will still send an order to your POS, even though it is not paid for at that moment. Since an Uncharged Order is typically caused by a temporary payment processor issue, it can usually be re-charged or resolved directly with the customer right away, and the risk to the restaurant is small. Moreover, we want to ensure the restaurant receives the order so the customer gets their order within their expected timeframe. 

See below for an example of two Uncharged Orders on the Orders Review & Search page. You can see both orders are CLOSED, and their POS Status is SUCCESS, which is an indication the order has been sent to the POS successfully.

Notice, however, that the Payment Status is still listed as AUTHORIZED (rather than the PAID status we would expect). This is an indication that the order is Uncharged.

In this scenario, all designated Notification Email recipients would be notified in real-time, and the two orders would also appear on the Uncharged Orders page in your Admin Panel. 

How to Retry Charging an Uncharged Order

Please view this related article: How to Retry Charging an Uncharged Order