A payment status represents the current state of a fund flow between a customer and your account. It indicates exactly where the money sits: whether it is still with your customer, reserved by their bank, or already on its way to your balance.
How it works with Checkout.com
Checkout.com uses a hierarchical structure to give you full control over your funds: a payment has zero or more actions, and an action has zero or more transactions.
A payment represents the top-level entity in your fund flow hierarchy, indicating exactly how money moves through your account. It facilitates the transfer of funds from a source (such as a cardholder's account) to you, or from you to a destination as a payout. Within the system, these are identified by a unique ID beginning with pay.
An action is your specific request to perform an operation, such as an authorization, capture, void, or refund. A single payment can have multiple actions (for example, several partial captures). Each request generates a unique ID starting with act_.
A transaction is the singular result of an interaction between Checkout.com and a third party, like a card scheme (Visa/Mastercard). One action can produce multiple transactions if retries are necessary due to failures. The final transaction determines the outcome of the action and the resulting payment status.
When a customer initiates a payment, we perform an authorization action. If the bank approves, the status becomes authorised. To receive the funds, you must trigger a capture action.
Data flow and logic
- Authentication: We verify that the person initiating the transaction is the genuine cardholder or account owner.
- Authorization: Funds are reserved for you on the cardholder's account.
- Capture: This initiates the actual movement of funds from the cardholder's account to your merchant account.
- Clearing and settlement: This is the final stage where funds move from the Issuer, through the Card Network, to your Available balance, ready for settlement payouts.
Your status workflow
Your payment moves through different states based on the specific actions you take or automated system triggers. Each status has a response code.
Pay-in statuses
- Pending: You are waiting on the results of authentication and authorisation.
- Authorized: Funds have been successfully blocked or reserved for you. Unlike a refund, you can void this state to release the hold with no money actually moving.
- Captured: Funds have moved from the customer to you; no further capture can be made on this specific authorisation. To return these funds, you must now use a refund.
- Partially captured: Part of the authorised funds have moved to you; further captures might still be processed against the remaining balance.
- Partially refunded: Part of the captured funds have been moved from your merchant account back to the customer.
- Voided: Authorised funds were released back to the customer's reserve because you requested it or the authorisation expired. This happens before money moves.
- Refunded: Captured funds are sent back to the cardholder's account. This happens after the money has already been moved to you.
- Declined: The process stopped because authentication or authorisation failed.
- Canceled: Specifically in APMs (Alternative Payment Methods), the customer canceled the payment on the partner's hosted page before the payment was authorised.
- Expired: In APMs, the redirect URL expired before the customer could authorize the payment.
- Returned: Specifically for APMs, the provider (not the merchant) returns the funds to the customer.
Payout statuses
- Pending: The payout has been initiated and is awaiting processing by the bank or card scheme. This can be caused by timeline thresholds, sanctions screening, or pending requests for additional information from our Compliance team.
- Paid: The payout was successfully delivered to the destination card. This status specifically applies to card payouts.
- Approved: The payout was approved and funds have been dispatched to the destination bank account. This status specifically applies to bank payouts.
- Returned: The bank payout was returned by the receiving bank after funds were dispatched. This occurs when the bank cannot deliver the funds to the recipient; check the Return action in the timeline for details.
- Declined: The payout was declined by the card scheme or bank, and funds were not sent to the recipient.
Expanding your knowledge: advanced payment types
Beyond standard one-time payments, your business flow may involve specialized types of transactions:
Payment categories
- Regular: Standard cardholder-initiated transactions.
- Cardholder-initiated transactions (CIT) and merchant-initiated transactions (MIT): Payments processed at fixed intervals for subscriptions or payment plans.
- MOTO: Mail Order / Telephone Order payments.
- AFT (Account Funding Transaction): A transaction where funds are pulled from a Visa/Mastercard account to fund another account, such as digital wallet pre-funding or person-to-person transfers.
Additional actions
- Incremental authorization: You can perform additional authorizations on top of an initial one to reserve more funds if the order value increases.
- Card verification: An action used to verify a card's validity without blocking a specific purchase amount.
- Payout: Moving funds from your merchant account to a destination, such as a customer's card or bank account.
Where to go next
Now that you understand the logic behind each status, you can dive into the implementation:
- Explore our Payments API to learn how to trigger captures, voids, refunds, and to manage outgoing fund flows.
- Set up webhooks (public events) to receive automated notifications the moment a status changes, so you can automate your shipping and fulfillment.