Customers who frequent the Roundup or happened to use a credit card from March 14 until April 8th (almost a month), may see these charges appear this week. This could really hurt people who keep their credit card balances tight and if you have a debit card you could get all kinds of fees from your bank if you budget this wrong and notice this almost a month later. This looks to be an error on the credit card processing company but Roundup is taking some blows on Facebook and negative PR from the mix up.
Dear Round Up Customer: If you have used a Credit or Debit card at the Round Up between March 14 and April 8, your charges were not processed at that time. Our Micros/CC Processing Company failed to process the charges until April 9, 2013. The new charges you may be seeing on your statements are actually from that March 14 thru April 8 purchases. Please examine the dates of your charges closely to confirm that they are in fact valid on the dates you signed for each purchase. You have not be double charged, these are not an error, just delayed billing over which we had no control. We apoligize for any inconvenience that this may have caused. If you are still in doubt about any charge, please feel free to contact our office to confirm purchases.
When you do use credit cards at bars do remember that they pre authorize the charge sometimes for $60 or more. This makes it so the bar can verify you have funds to run a tab and do not just walk out on a high bill. If you knew you spent money and was no longer showing pending, you should have kept that money aside for when it did post\ because sometimes it does take more than a week to get it all sorted out. Station 4 credit card charges take a minimum of four days to appear correctly on my charge card. If you are using a debit card be extra careful since these drain straight out of your bank account. At least with a credit card you get to wait a month for it to appear and if you owe interest on your balance then this will actually help you because it delayed the charge for almost a month. Read more about using credit cards and earning rewards at clubs and bars to understand how this works for miles and cash back.
Yeah. That sucks. I don’t see how that problem went unnoticed by their merchant services and/or the bar for almost a month??? That is just crazy. Now as someone who works in the retail banking industry, I will say- if it was my bank customer, I’d say it was the bar customers job to monitor their account and keep a balanced checkbook. But in this day and age that just isn’t realistic in how most people bank. Most people utilize online banking exclusively and if they see a transaction pending on their account, then that is the end of it for them, they account for the tip and move on. Based on what they described occurred, it sounds like an issue with their merchant services and while I doubt merchant services is going to want to refund people for weeks of charges, there needs to be something they can do to help all the people who are going to be out money and charged tons of OD fees now. A regular there could be in the whole hundreds of dollars with an issue lasting three weeks. That’s crazy. – Liz, Roundup Customer and Marketing Specialist
The Roundup Saloon should look into other merchant providers. This should be unacceptable for a business of any kind to take this long to have transactions go through and the processor or merchant provider should be responsible.
As someone who works in the point of sale industry, per-authorizations ARE in fact, a standard practice. That is not the point here. The point is that their merchant link was down for nearly a month. Businesses simply do not go a month without realizing that their processing is down and are doing everything via offline, store and forward transactions. When the issue was known, I think a simple sign at each register explaining the situation would have been courteous and respectful to the patrons. Also, the transactions did post on the original dates, because the authorizations went through, however the finalizations did not. The pending transactions were removed and then re-processed yesterday. Had I allowed my credit processor to do this, I would have been fired on the spot. – Stephen, IT Point-of-Sale Manager
There are lots of Facebook members in the thread saying to pay in cash but I do not agree with that either. You should be able to have the convenience and safety of using a credit card without having to worry about processing problems. We hope that they get this straightened out and change merchant providers.
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