Payment Card Processing 

Purpose

Payment card processing enables you to work with payment cards, for example, credit cards. Payment cards frequently replace other forms of payment and are hence essential for many merchants, consumers, and banks. They offer merchants a form of risk management because an authorized transaction is a guarantee of payment.

Implementation Notes

Payment card processing in SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) is designed especially for merchants, rather than for consumers or banks.

To use payment card processing for business transactions, you must have set up the “Interdependent Changes“ data exchange scenario. For more information, see Interdependent Changes.

To use payment card processing for business transactions in Service, you must have set up billing in the ERP system for the assigned item categories so that payment card processing is triggered via the follow-up documents in the ERP system.

Integration

To process payment cards, you must arrange with a clearing house or bank for authorization and settlement services. Depending on your arrangements, and particularly if you work with Internet transactions, a third party may relay the electronic messages between you and the clearing house or bank. In Customizing for payment cards, you define how this electronic communication takes place.

You can enter and change payment card data in the business partner master data and then use this information during transaction processing. For more information about payment cards, see SAP Library at Cross-Application Components  ® SAP Business Partner  ® SAP Business Partner Data  ® Payment Cards.

Complete processing of payment card transactions created in CRM requires an online transaction processing system (OLTP system), such as SAP ECC. Whereas transactions are created, authorized, and changed in the CRM system, shipping, billing, accounting, and settlement with the clearing house are processed in the ERP system. For information about payment card processing in SAP ECC, see SAP Library at SAP ERP Central Component ® Logistics  ® Sales ® Payment Card Processing.

The following illustration shows which payment card processing steps occur in CRM, and which aspects occur in the ERP system or another OLTP system, and where communication with the clearing house takes place.

Creating Payment Card Transactions gives a step-by-step description of this procedure.

Features

Payment card processing includes the following functions:

Usage of Payment Cards in the Sales Order

You can use several payment cards in a document.

In the document, you can define a maximum amount for the cards, where one card per document must always be unlimited.

Authorization

The system communicates with the clearing house to authorize the transaction amount automatically. Manual processing is also possible.

The authorization horizon lets you specify that the system performs an authorization at a later time, dependent on the delivery date or billing date.

For more information, see Authorization.

Security Measures

●     Address verification

The clearing house uses the address verification system (AVS) to check whether the card owner’s address matches that in the customer data. For more information, see Address Verification.

●     Card verification

For more information, see Card Verification Value.

●     Encryption

For security reasons, we recommend that you save payment card data in encrypted form. In Customizing, activate encryption. When you have activated encryption, the payment card numbers in the document are displayed in masked form.

Merchant ID Determination

The system uses organizational units to determine the merchant ID automatically. For more information, see Merchant ID Determination.

Restrictions

You can only use payment cards if you perform billing of your transactions in the ERP system. Billing in SAP CRM does not support payment card processing.