There may be instances where a customer will report that they may have multiple pending payments in their bank account but only one valid payment with ASAP. This happens often due to how different banks will place an authorization hold on a payment until they can validate the charge. An Authorization hold (also card authorization, preauthorization, or preauth) is the practice within the banking industry of verifying electronic transactions initiated with a debit card or credit card and holding this balance as unavailable until either the merchant clears the transaction, also called settlement, or the hold "falls off." In the case of debit cards, authorization holds can fall off the account, thus rendering the balance available again, anywhere from one to eight business days after the transaction date depending on the bank's policy. In the case of credit cards, holds may last as long as thirty days, depending on the issuing bank.
With ASAP, multiple authorization holds can occur though one invoice is generated due to how we create an invoice for a customer when they are checking out. The process of an invoice is when a student is adding items to their shop cart, a "draft" type invoice is created, recognizing as a placeholder for the items in the cart. This is done in case of issues where capacity can be a problem, the "draft" invoice hold the student's pending enrollments until they determine if they're able to successfully enroll or not. If the student decides they no longer would like to enroll or their card is unsuccessful, we do not create an invoice/record of the attempted payment in order to prevent over-enrollment for classes.
What this means for you is that even if the customer's credit card fails, we do not keep a record of it to avoid keeping data of failed attempts. You may see customer's reporting multiple holds on their card. Once the bank determines settlement of the payments, the remaining authorization holds will be removed and the payment will be cleared from it's pending state. This is determined by the issuing bank and ASAP does not have any control on if there's a hold placed and how long it will stay with the customer's bank account.