BEWARE IF USING ACH: $8,661 IN FAILED TRANSACTIONS, NO ALERTS RECEIVED

[haleyg94]

Since I can’t get anyone from the FinTech “support” team on the phone (it’s estimated that someone will call me back “sometime today,” or “within the next 24-48 hours”), I’m bringing this here. 

If you are considering using ServiceTitan to collect ACH payments from your customers, I would reconsider, and here’s why: I just found out that we’ve had $8,661 in failed ACH transactions over the past 7 months, and we never received an alert about any of them. 

If you already collect ACH payments from your customers through ServiceTitan, check your bank account now!! This may have happened to you. Chances are, if it's happening to us, we’re not the only ones out there with this problem. 

Here’s how we found out: I had a customer call me this week about an ACH payment she made in October that she hasn’t seen on her bank statement. On our end, it appears that the transaction was successful. Here’s a screenshot:

See? It looks like the customer tried to pay, entered the wrong routing number, and then tried again and the transaction was a success. However, upon logging into the SmartPay portal, I found some conflicting information. Under “Auth. Response,” it says, “Success,” under “Current Status,” it says “Invalid / Closed Account.”

Here’s the extremely unhelpful email I received from Customer Support letting me know that the October payment didn’t go through:

Obviously, my first thought was, if this has happened once, could it have happened before? A more thorough support team might have thought the same, and actually done some investigation into this VERY DISTURBING problem rather than just telling me to delete it and try again. Again, we were never alerted about this failed transaction, and it came to my attention only because an especially honest customer called to question it. I looked at our bank statement – we did initially receive credit for the transaction, but 4 days later, the money was removed from our account. (We're a smaller business and we're often behind on reconciling bank statements. But we also thought we could trust our payment processing system when it says a transaction is a success.)

As soon as I got this email, I requested a call back, and then called Customer Support to try to get connected to someone who could help me. No go – they would not transfer me to anyone, because apparently this isn’t important enough. While I have been waiting, I’ve found 3 other similar transactions since April. Altogether, these failed transactions total $8,661. 

We will be looking into other payment processing options after this. I just don’t trust this platform at all anymore.

Have you had a similar experience, or do you have another recommendation for processing ACH payments? If so, please comment below because I'd like to connect. 

[haleyg94]

Here's what I found out:

1. You have to contact the FinTech Support team and specifically request to receive any error reports as alerts sent directly to your email. This is NOT done automatically. It was NOT offered during onboarding. I also think onboarding should spend more time on the SmartPay portal... I got the impression that I really didn't need to worry about logging in unless there was an issue where I needed to reverse a payment or something. But apparently you can't tell if there's a problem with a transaction just by looking at ServiceTitan, which brings me to point #2...

2. Just because an ACH transaction is marked as successful in ServiceTitan, that apparently doesn't mean it was actually a successful transaction. I think a transaction should be marked as "pending" until there's actually an answer from the bank as to whether it failed or was successful, but that's not the case. Major system flaw. I'd prefer to see no status at all than to have transactions labeled as "successful" when that doesn't really mean anything. 

Now that we have alerts set up, I think we should be ok. I'd advise anyone else using ACH through ServiceTitan to get those alerts set up ASAP, because it could save you a lot of headache. Should be standard practice, but it's not. 

[Bree_Mc]

I'm sorry to hear that this happened to you all. I'll start looking into our ACH process now, I appreciate the heads-up and can definitely sympathize with the poor customer service. We also get a runaround and it's extremely frustrating in the middle of an issue to have to wait days to get any kind of progress on a solution.

As for identifying the errors, are you pulling an ACH error report in ST and then cross-referencing it with your bank statements to spot discrepancies?

[haleyg94]

Hi Bree,

When you log into the SmartPay portal, on the dashboard there's a section that looks like this: 

Where it says "Invalid/Closed Account," you can click and see details of any transactions that came back as invalid. It only shows a couple months at a time, but you'll be able to change the date range to view transactions further back. Hope this helps.