Sometimes, issues with credit cards and gift cards can be difficult because there is so much involved: There’s POSitouch, there’s SlipStream/Txnplus, and there’s the credit card processor. The problem could be with any one of them.

Luckily, there’s a trick that almost always works to find the problem: Try running the transaction from the Batch Manager instead of from POSitouch.

If you don’t get the error from the batch manager, then it’s almost certainly a networking problem between POSitouch and SlipStream. Make sure your IP and port settings are correct in POSitouch and in SlipStream.

Using your psychic powers:

If you’re authorizing a credit card from the batch manager and you still get an error message, look at which letters are capitalized.

• If the letters are all uppercase, like “TRANS DENIED” or “INVALID CARD”, then that message is probably coming back from the processor and SlipStream is just showing it to you. This means you’ll want to make sure you’ve got the right processor parameters, and you might be able to get more information if you call the processor and ask why they’re sending back that error.
• If the letters are in sentence case, like “Transaction Error” or “Error building batch”, then the message is probably coming from SlipStream and the processor isn’t even involved. You’ll want to try things like updating SlipStream or sending error reports to Midnite Express.

There are rare occasions when these rules don’t hold, but they’re almost always true. Often, if you know who actually wrote the error message, you can fix it pretty quickly.