You may notice a payment status of “Pending” for your ACH / Bank payments. This is because ACH Payments follow a slightly different payments workflow.

ACH payments workflow

ACH payments take up to 5 business days to receive acknowledgment of their success or failure:

  1. When created, ACH charges have the initial status of Pending. A pending transaction is immediately created reflecting the payment amount, and can be seen in the “Pending” tab of your payments report. Once a Pending payment is created, it can not be cancelled or modified.

  2. Important: Pending ACH Payments are immediately treated as Accepted payments with respect to registration status, so they will show up as a successful registration in your reports, and they will be given access to all the event details. This is so anyone registering for an event within 5 days of it happening doesn’t have to wait until the ACH payment goes through to complete registering for an event.

  3. Your customer will immediately receive a receipt acknowledging their payment has been initiated, and will also be informed that this payment is “Pending” and they need to ensure they have enough funds in the their bank account to cover the payment.

  4. During the following 5 business days, the payment transitions to either Accepted or Failed depending on the customer’s bank.

  5. Accepted ACH payments are reflected in your available balance after 7 business days, at which point the funds are available for automatic transfer to your bank account.

Failed ACH Payments


Failures can happen for a number of reasons, such as insufficient funds, a bad account number, or the customer disabling debits from their bank account.

  1. Before a Pending Payment is created, we perform a check and confirm there are sufficient funds to cover the payment amount. However, because when those funds are removed are controlled by the bank, there is no way of knowing if there will still be sufficient funds when the payment is actually withdrawn from the customer’s bank account.
  2. Failed ACH payments reverse the Pending transaction created.
  3. Both you and the customer will be notified of a failed payment, which will then show up under “Outstanding” payments.
  4. Because Pending ACH Payments are treated as a successfully completed registration as soon as the payment is created, if the payment then fails, that customer’s registration will still show up as completed in the system. The customer will see the payment is now outstanding, but if any further action is needed you will need to follow up with the customer manually.


ACH disputes


Disputes on ACH payments are fundamentally different than those on credit card payments. If a customer’s bank accepts the request to return the funds for a disputed charge, the funds are immediately removed from our account. As a result we will add the equivalent charge to your monthly billing to recoup these funds. 

Unlike credit card disputes, you can’t contest ACH reversals. You must contact your customer to resolve the situation. The ACH network allows 60 days for consumers to contest a debit.