Delay the Capture of Payments

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Overview

By default, the Reader SDK immediately captures all card payments in a transaction, but the SDK also supports the delayed capture of card payments. For example, when a customer makes an in-store purchase from a seller, the seller might want to authorize funds at the time of purchase and capture the funds when the item ships from the warehouse. The CheckoutManager can be configured to delay the capture of all card payments in a transaction.

Card payments are authorized by the issuing bank at the moment of purchase. An authorized transaction means that the bank has put a hold on the funds but the seller hasn't received the payment. Customers see this as a pending transaction on their credit card statement. At some later point, transactions are reconciled by capturing the transaction.

A captured transaction means that the seller receives the funds previously put on hold by the issuing bank.

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1. Configure your checkout to delay the capture of card payments

To delay the capture of all card payments in a transaction, set delayCapture to true on the CheckoutParameters.Builder instance used to configure the checkout flow.

Important

Setting delayCapture to true skips the receipt, tipping, and signature screens and the following parameters are ignored: tipSettings, skipReceipt, and collectSignature.

CheckoutParameters checkoutParameters = CheckoutParameters.newBuilder(new Money(100, USD)) .delayCapture(true) .build(); CheckoutManager checkoutManager = ReaderSdk.checkoutManager(); checkoutManager.startCheckoutActivity(this, checkoutParameters);
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2. Get the transaction ID and location ID of a delayed capture transaction

Important

As of August 15, 2019, the CaptureTransaction endpoint has been marked as deprecated; however, you must still use this endpoint for capturing transactions.

After the checkout completes successfully, you can call the CaptureTransaction Square Connect endpoint from your backend to capture all card payments in the transaction. To do that, you need to get the transaction ID and location ID from the checkout result and then send those values to your backend.

Important

Square automatically cancels a transaction if it's not captured within 36 hours of its creation.

The CaptureTransaction endpoint requires a Square transaction ID and location ID. The Reader SDK returns both for any successful checkout that contains card payments.

Delayed transactions cannot be voided with the VoidTransaction endpoint.

You cannot capture a delayed transaction with the Reader SDK. Transactions are captured using the Transactions API on a backend service. If you haven't already added transaction capture logic to your backend service, you need to do so before you capture delayed transactions.