The Transaction Tracking system consolidates all of the university’s online payment into a single payment processing solution and provides a number of features:-

• The university uses a single merchant account and payment provider for all of its diverse online payment applications and therefore amortises the cost of that service over multiple requirements.
• Using a single provider for all transactions increases the volume of transactions and has allowed the university to negotiate lower and more favourable charges.
• IT Services developed software forwards the payment requests from each system and, in doing so, is able to differentiate between the many local systems using the service. As settlement monies come into the university they can be allocated to the correct general ledger codes in line with our own system of local trading accounts.
• The same IT Services developed software handles the ‘callback’. The messages that come back from the payment provider to say if a card was declined, if it was successful and that funds are secured. Callbacks may be sent on to the originating application and processed automatically (although you have to write your own software to do that) or simply stored for inspection by a human later.
• User of the Transaction Tracking System can view the status of their system’s transactions, total revenue, volume of transactions, make refunds and generally manage their trading account without having to rent an external service.
• TTS manages the transaction so the money appears in a your profit centre automatically – this was one of the main drivers for having the TTS and it saves the customer a great deal of time in managing the reconcilliation process.
• Allowing the Transaction Tracking Service to store the results of a payment for later manual inspection means that incredibly simple trading solutions are possible. Even to the extent of a static sitebuilder page. The page would simply collect the product and customer details and forward them off for payment. The TTS will store the response to the payment in a trading account and a human can inspect it the next day for confirmation. If OK products can be packaged and shipped as normal.

The TTS has many features not listed here including reconciling accounts and feeding payments into the correct SAP ledger codes.

The simple solutions however are still labour intensive in so far as application owners manually checking payments have completed and updating order status. Many customers require integration with their run of business application and this can certainly be achieved. If your software has facilities for hooking in a generic payment provider then IT Services TTS can probably be used to good effect. If it doesn’t then the normal recourse would be to ask your supplier to write program code to achieve the integration.