What are blacklisted transactions and what to do about them.
So, what are blacklisted transactions?
Blacklisted transactions happen on ACH processing and happen in realtime. You can treat them like declines, similar to how you would treat a decline of a credit card.
The purpose is to prevent transactions from being submitted for ACH processing on account numbers that have had previous "hard returns" and to inform you of those transactions so you can fix the issue.
The process looks like this:
Any time you run an ACH transaction that gets returned for one of the following "hard return" reasons that account number goes on the blacklist within our system to prevent you from continuing to bill the client on that number. Otherwise each time would result in an ACH return which has fees associated with it and the banks don't like to see businesses attempting to bill the same account over and over that has been closed, blocked or doesn't exist, etc.
ACH "hard return" reasons:
- Account Closed
- No Account
- Stop Payment or Stop on Source Document
- Account Frozen
Any future ACH transaction on an account number that has had a previous return for a reason on the list above will get blacklisted and won't be submitted to the banking system for processing.
For Account Closed and No Account you should reach out to your client as soon as possible to get updated account or payment information.
For Stop Payment or Account Frozen you should reach out to your client and ask that they remove the stop payment on their account or un freeze it. Once they have confirmed the account is not frozen any longer or the stop payment has been lifted you can reach out to us so we can remove the account number from the blacklist and you can attempt the transaction again.