Have debit cards decline a transaction instead of allowing a partial approval

Currently, our system allows partial approval when a parent makes a payment with a debit card. This means that if a parent submits a payment of $100 but only has $10 in their account instead of declining the transaction for insufficient funds. The issue with this is that our software products (SCW, DT, OL) cannot account for this feature, which causes problems. An example of this is registration. The parent will make the payment and get a success message/email, and the software will successfully process the registration, even if it’s a partial payment. The parents think that they made the full payment, and the center thinks that the full payment was made because they were registered. Most recently, this affected Cherry Creek Schools (SCW). Below are some examples,

Farrell Family 33138 originally requested an amount was $180 but was partially approved and processed for 6.00; 8/16/2024 Payer Sara Shaw Family Center Polton
Watkins Family 36998; the requested amount was $400 but it was partially approved and processed for 348.21; 8/19/2024 Payer Thea Watkins Family Center Mission Viejo

There is no easy way to determine which parents have partially paid and which ones haven’t, which can cause issues with parents securing spots who have not paid in full. Cherry Creek has hundreds of transactions for MasterCard.

If the Credit Card and the funds used to make a payment are unavailable, the card declines with an over-limit and asks the parent to resubmit.

Centers also call in about partial approvals for transactions after registering; however, we currently do not have data on the effect. The TE team is now tagging these cases with the topic: TE- Partial Approval.

Note: This primarily affects MasterCard debit cards. At this point, we have not seen examples of other cards.