Transaction Statuses & Payout Schedules (Credit Card Vs. ACH)

Reconciliation involves a lot more than just seeing a line item on your bank statement. It involves understanding the various transaction statuses you might see associated with donations in your Nucleus Dashboard. It also involves understanding when and how donations are deposited to your bank account.

But don’t worry! We’re here to help you make sense of it all 🙂

In this guide, we'll cover the following topics. Click on any one to jump ahead.

Transaction Statuses

Note: The below transaction statuses only pertain to donations given via credit card or ACH (i.e. directly through the GivingFlow). For information regarding manually added donations, click here.

There are five different transaction statuses you might see associated with your donations. Some will appear more frequently than others, and some will only appear on certain donations depending on the type of payment method used.

  • Pending: The transaction has been accepted through your church’s GivingFlow or Payment Step in a custom Flow. Because of how quickly credit card transactions are processed, you will likely only see this status on ACH transactions.
  • Successful: The transaction has been given the green light to be transferred by our card processor. This is the equivalent of, “Your check is in the mail!” Credit card transactions almost always showcase a successful status immediately following the transaction, whereas ACH donations might take a few days before changing from pending to successful.
  • Paid Out: The transaction has been successfully processed and has been sent from our card processor to your church’s bank account.
  • Refunded: The transaction has been manually refunded by someone on your admin team. The transaction typically takes the same amount of time to return to the original payment method as it did to land in your church’s bank account originally.
  • Failed: The transaction was unable to go through correctly. This status only applies to transactions made via ACH. (Credit card transactions will fail instantly before completing in the GivingFlow or Payment Step.) In this case, our card processor or the giver’s bank reviewed the details of the ACH transaction, determined something was incorrect (the bank account or routing number, the person’s name, insufficient funds, etc.), and the transaction is now incomplete. If any funds left the original payment method, our card processor has now returned them.

Note: If you’re a Canadian church using Nucleus to process donations and/or digital transactions, you may only see pending and successful statuses. Previously, Fiserv Canada didn’t allow us to display paid out statuses. But now, our card processor is working towards ensuring you see the same type of data as your American counterparts! As they make this happen, you may see inconsistent paid out statuses on some transactions, but not others.

If you’d like to help, let us know if you see inconsistent or incorrect paid out statuses on transactions. We can then pass on the feedback to our card processor for them to consider how to improve the data our system can interpret to more accurately reflect the reality of paid out transactions.

Feel free to send any feedback on this to hello@nucleus.church

Manually Added Transactions

Nucleus Giving and Payments in Nucleus Flows allows you to manually add transactions to your Dashboard. While not all churches will utilize this feature, this allows you to keep track of all transactions and donations coming through to your church should you wish to use Nucleus' platform to keep track of those financials, rather than utilizing another system to do this (on top of also keeping track of all online transactions coming through Nucleus.)

The above section discusses transaction statuses for all online donations. But what about manually added transactions?

Because there is no way for Nucleus to know if a check or cash transaction actually makes it to your church's bank account, there's no way for our system to know when to adjust the transaction status to paid out.

As such, all manually added transactions will always have a status of successful only. So if you're curious why the status on a transaction isn't changing from successful to paid out and it's been a while, double check to see what method that transaction was given by. If it was labelled as check, cash, or other, you're just watching a kettle that will never boil 😅

But if the transaction was given by credit card or ACH and it's taking much longer than normal, please reach out to our Customer Success team and we can investigate for you 😎

Transfers & Handling Of Processing Fees

Nucleus deposits funds to your church’s bank account in batch deposits. We like to call these Transfers because the funds are being transferred to your bank account. (Clever, we know 😁)

At the end of every single day, whatever is available to be deposited to your church’s bank account will be deposited. All credit card transactions will be batched together in one Transfer, while all ACH transactions will be batched together in another Transfer.

Focusing on credit card Transfers: Donors always cover the 1.9% processing fee for each credit card transaction included in them. These fees are sent directly to our card processor. Then, all the credit card donations that are available to be paid out are grouped together and sent to your church’s bank account in a single transaction.

Note: If you’re a Canadian church, credit card fees are handled slightly differently. Instead of the fees being sent directly to our card processor, the fees are deposited alongside the transactions, and are then later withdrawn from your account, leaving you with 100% of all the intended transactions. If you’d like more information about this, send us a message to hello@nucleus.church.

Now for ACH Transfers: Donors always cover the typical 25-cent ACH processing fee for each ACH transaction included in them. Contrary to how credit card fees are handled, for now, these ACH fees are actually deposited alongside the transactions in the Transfer. Then once a month (usually around the 5th-7th), all the ACH transaction fees for the prior month are extracted from your church’s bank account.

At the end of the (metaphorical) day, all typical processing fees for both credit card and ACH transactions are always 100% covered by the donor. They just reach our card processor in different ways depending on if they’re covered via credit card or ACH.

Transaction Payout Schedules

As you’ve noticed that the processing fees are handled differently between credit card and ACH transactions, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the payout schedule also differs between credit card and ACH Transfers.

Each Transfer is solidified at 9:30pm EST. So whatever credit card transactions that are available at that time will be batched together in one Transfer, and whatever ACH transactions that are available at that time will be batched together in different Transfer. These will then be deposited the next day to your church’s bank account.

Credit card transactions are processed much more quickly than ACH transactions. Typically they are deposited the day after they are given (so you can usually expect transactions via credit card to land in your church’s bank account the next day).

Credit card Transfers appear on your bank statement with Merchant Bankcd Deposit (usually along with a portion of your church’s name). Credit card Transfers may land in your bank account all 7 days of the week, but typically M-F.

ACH transactions take a bit longer to process and are typically deposited 5-7 business days after the initial transactions are made. One of the main reasons for the delay is that it could take several days for a donor’s bank to even release the funds for our card process to begin processing the transaction. This is likely due to the size of the bank and their unique processes (e.g. major banks like Wells Fargo and Chase vs. a small credit union).

ACH Transfers appear on your bank statement with Fiserv Pmnt Svcs Payout (usually along with a portion of your church’s name). ACH Transfers only land in your bank account on business days. This means that, if there are available ACH transactions to be deposited to your bank account on Saturday and Sunday, you could see up to three separate ACH Transfers on Monday.

Below is a visual guide of a few different scenarios based on deposit timing you could experience with ACH transactions. (Keep in mind the differences will most likely be influenced by your giver's bank, rather than your church's account.)

Note: If there are no transactions available to be deposited, then you will not receive any Transfer. On some days, you might only see one Transfer (credit card or ACH related), while other days you might see both a credit card and ACH Transfer. It just all depends on what is available to be paid out at the cutoff time each day.

Holds On Transactions

On your bank statement, rather than seeing a deposit, you might see a seemingly random withdrawal from our card processor (not related to the once-a-month withdrawal for ACH processing fees).

While it is very rare, you may see processing fees from a credit card transaction withdrawn from your bank account before it lands in your bank account.

First, don’t panic! Once the transaction is deposited into your church’s bank account, the processing fees will also be deposited along with it to cancel out the previous withdrawal. So eventually, it will even out.

Second, this can happen for a couple of reasons:

  • Abnormal Activity Verification: As a security measure to ensure that your church doesn't experience any fraudulent transactions, CardConnect may hold your funds to verify and clear any abnormal activity. This typically happens with significantly large transactions that fall outside the normal range of transaction size that your church receives.
  • Merchant-Wide Funding Delays: While not often, our card processor will need to run updates or changes to their systems, which could potentially put a brief hold on depositing funds.

As an example, if someone donates $100 via credit card to your church, the donor will give a total of $101.90 to cover the 1.9% processing fee. Under normal circumstances, the $1.90 will go directly to our card processor, and the $100 will land in the church’s bank account the next day.

But in a situation where the transaction is withheld by our card processor, the $1.90 will first be withdrawn from your bank account. As soon as the funds clear (normally within 24-48 hours), you’ll receive a deposit of the intended gift amount plus the $1.90 that was previously withdrawn, canceling out the earlier deduction.

Below is a visual of this process.

If you ever see a seemingly random withdrawal from our card processor and want clarity, please reach out to us at hello@nucleus.church with the date and amount of the withdrawal, as well as the actual line item description, and we can dig up some information for you.

Note: In situations where our card processor withholds a specific donation, they require details about the donor - including their full name, mailing address, and their relationship with your church - before they can release those funds. This happens in cases where our card processor suspects a transaction is fraudulent, so providing these details will help either confirm or dismiss their suspicions. In these rare circumstances, our team at Nucleus will communicate with your Giving team.

What Next?

While learning about reconciling your bank statements, you may have some other questions that might pop up. Below are some guides you might find helpful:

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