Event Logging

Do you often wonder about the status of Automatic Payment runs or how many emails and/or texts were sent out for the Bill Notification Service?  Wouldn’t it be nice to know if there was an issue when one of the automated systems was supposed to run and didn’t?  Don’t you hate it when a transaction showed as successfully processed, but is nowhere to be found in your billing system?  Well, Transaction Warehouse has now built the logging reports that will put your mind at ease and hopefully help you answer a lot of your customer’s questions about their payments.

The new logs can be found under Reports → System Reports → System Event Log

The System Event Log will only populate under two scenarios:

1) scheduled to occur - such as Automatic Payments and Bill Notifications

2) when there is a Pending Writeback or a system warning/error

The logs can be reported by date, similar to the Transaction Diagnostics report.  These logs are for informational purposes only, but can help you diagnose an issue that may have occurred with a customer.  The logs also are used by the support staff at Transaction Warehouse to help pinpoint or notify you of issues with your connectivity.  When applicable, the reports will be broken down into four categories, which will be explained in detail below:

Pending Writebacks:  One of the more frustrating things we hear about is when a transaction was processed successfully, but for some reason did not make it into your billing software.  We’ve always had the Pending Writebacks report to show these “lost” transactions but there’s never been anything to get your attention when they exist.  We have now added a visual cue that will show up when you log in as an administrator to notify you immediately that there are pending writebacks that need to be resolved:

 

 When you click on the Reports menu, it will then notify you of how many Pending Writebacks need attention:

 

Also, as part of the System Events Log, there will be an area that will show you the dates where there is a Pending Writeback and how many transactions are impacted.  By clicking on “View”, that will take you to the standard Pending Writebacks report.    For additional information on Pending Writebacks, please check out our article on the Support Portal.

Automatic Payments:  We receive a few questions regarding status of specific automatic payment transactions:  how many ran?  where there any issues? Now you will have the ability to see when the process ran (start and finish times), how many accounts were attempted and of those, how many were processed successfully, were rejected, or had errors.  The row will be color coded depending on the status:  

• Green indicates no denials and no errors

• Yellow indicates some denials, but no errors

• Red indicates any errors

Once you click on the link for the day, it will take you to the Transaction Diagnostics report and will show you the details of the transactions.  Additional information regarding Automatic Payments  can be found on our Support Portal.

Errors and Warnings:  Lance has often played the ‘wizard behind the green curtain’, but now you too can have access to the insider information when there are communication errors.  This report will document a number of scenarios, including but not limited to:

• Communication errors with the Data Service tied to your billing software, this happens when our system is up and healthy however your system or network is preventing us from accessing your billing software.

• Communication errors with the Payment Gateway, this happens when both our system and your billing software system and network are up and healthy however the payment gateway vendor utilized to process your payments is experiencing difficulties.

• Errors with the Phone Payment system (IVR)

• Warnings with the Automatic Payment processes

These are not actionable items, but are helpful in order to diagnose a problem such as being down overnight and transactions not being processed - those errors would show up on this report.

Bill Notifications:  This report provides details regarding the  activities that occur during a given bill notification run.  As explained in our Bill Notification (BNS) article, for those participating, your customers can enroll and choose to receive their bill via email and/or text message.  This report will provide you with a number of metrics that may be helpful when assisting a customer:

• # customers enrolled (this is the number of unique accounts are enrolled in the BNS service)

• # customers queried (this verifies that the service queried all enrolled accounts)

• # customers qualified (determines the number of enrolled customers that have a balance equal to or greater than $0)

The next section shows how many emails and texts were attempted and sent.  If an email was sent, but bounced back, it would still count as a sent email. Finally, there is a unique count of customers notified in all - this takes into account those that are enrolled in both email and text notification.