Hi,

 Our organization is primed for growth and looking for a long term credit card processing solution.

We are currently using IC VERIFY, but are really not confident this will be an effective long term solution for our organziation.  I believe my predecessors have looked into IATS in the past, but shyed away from the extreme costs compared to IC Verify.

 IC Verify is very troublesome as far as lockups etc, and is really contributing to a lot of errors monthly, but I'm going to have a hard time convincing our department to switch to IATS because of the costs.

1. Can someone shed some light on the costs of IATS compared to what you found with IC Verify?  I'm trying to do some internal research to see what the differences were, and find out what we are paying now and what the proposal was from IATS.  Does anyone have any experience working with both and could breakdown the costs between them?
2. Are there other 3rd party modules or vendors that are out there who integrate well with Raiser's Edge, or are these the only two options?

I really appreciate if anyone can help shed some light on this.

 

Rehan, my organization is in a very similar situation to that which you describe for Raiser's Edge credit card processing. Regarding your question #1, the costs of troublesome ICVerify compared to the costs of using of IATS are difficult to quantify, but I soon may attempt to do just that. I too am very interested in hearing any replies or comments others have regarding this. Regarding your question #2, when I called Blackbaud a few weeks ago and asked them this question, their answer was only ICVerify or IATS.

I can't speak to what your cost comparison would be to switch from IC Verify to IATS, but I can tell you that we've been using IATS successfully since we started processing online gifts via RE:NetSolutions five years ago.  Also, we have just launched NetCommunity ... easy to set up, and the customer service is excellent.  The only problem we've had is that the fees are applied differently among the four major credit cards ... two of them charge a fee up front with each transaction, and the other two charge their fees monthly, so we have a challenge trying to reconcile the IATS transactions with our general ledger.  It seems to me that the ease of set-up, tremendous customer service and high rate of error-free transactions would be worth the extra cost.

Thank you, Kathleen, for your well informed post. I just saw the post today, I don't think I ever received an updated notification that there was a response.

Do you find that IATS rates are exorbitant compared to competitive market rates, or are the overall costs justified?  My preliminary research shows we would spend about 10% more on in house transactions using IATS, while it would be closer to 30% more for IATS transactions to process net community donations.

So I can perhaps justify the inhouse transactions, however, since our online system has few technical glitches right now, I definitely cannot justify using it for our online donations.  Any advice you can provide is greatly appreciated!

Thanks Drew, you're right. It's basically seems to be better cost versus fewer technical glitches.

Hi Kathleen,

Our organization has just purchased the Net Solutions module and will be using IATs to process our online credit card (cc) transactions.  It was my understanding that IATS will be charging us a flat rate per cc transaction.  I guess I'll have to watch for discrepancies once the system is up and running.  

In the meantime, how do you process your transaction and reconciliation with Finance, i.e., book the full amount to the donor gift record, say $25.00, but only receive $23.75 in payment from IATS due to the 5% transaction fee? How do you record the difference (transaction fee) in RE so that it shows in the reports and you reconcile at month end?

I look forward to hearing from you!

Paula

 

 

UPDATE:  We are starting to implement IATS, and are running into the NetCommunity Reconciliation issue.  We're working hard to find a resolution to this, but if IATS doesn't provide some backend support we may have to scrap plans to use this service, at least for Net Community.

Our internal finance operations dictate we need to have our Raiser's Edge Batch=IATS=Bank Deposit; for auditing purposes we have to prove to our auditors that a particular donation was traceable to a deposit.  We've worked out an easy fix to this, but I'm waiting for IATS to confirm they can help us with their backend reporting.

 The other fix is more costly for us as an organization, and really does not put us in a better position than we are now; basically like jumping from one frying pan to another.  So I'm sorry to say I that we may have to scrap this service.

It's such a shame; it's a good idea in theory, but I'm shocked at the lack of flexibility and straightforward reconciliation for accounting purposes.

If anyone has any ideas, or experience, please share...

We are a new RE client just launching our implementation project.  We use Touchnet Marketplace for credit card processing with our Datatel Colleague financials.  Has anyone written a custom interface to use Touchnet with The Raiser's Edge?

Thank you!
Dena Smith
Capital University
Columbus, OH