Payments can fail or be declined for a number of reasons. Several of these failures are preventative measures put in place to work in your favor. These help minimize the possibility of fraudulent payments that could otherwise result in disputes.

In this guide, we’ll cover:

• Understanding card declines
• Reviewing the most common decline codes
• Declining FSA or HSA cards
• Explaining decline errors when adding new cards

Note: See Processing Online Payments and Online Payments FAQs to learn more about charging client cards.

Understanding card declines

When a charge is submitted to your client's card issuer, their automated systems determine if they should authorize the charge. These systems analyze various signals, such as your client’s spending habits, account balance, and card information, including the expiration date, address information, and CVC.

There are a few common reasons why a client's card may decline:

• The card number or expiration date is incorrect
• The client doesn’t have enough funds available to make the payment
• Restrictions placed by the card issuer
• Generic reasons

Most declines are categorized by the card issuer as generic, so it isn’t always possible to know exactly why a payment was declined. If all of the card information seems correct, please have your client contact their card issuer and ask for more information.

Important: For privacy and security reasons, card issuers can only discuss the specifics of a declined payment with their cardholders. They can’t discuss this with you, SimplePractice, or our payment processing partner.

Reviewing the most common decline codes

While there are many decline codes that could prevent a client’s payment from going through, some are more common than others. Below, you’ll find the most common decline codes, what they mean, and the steps you can take to resolve it:

If your client isn’t sure why a card was declined, you can direct them to their bank or card issuer for more information. We often see that having a client submit a specific request to their financial institution to have your charges approved clears up some decline codes for future charges.

If you’d like to confirm which decline code was issued for a transaction, please submit a help request so our team can assist you further.

Note: In some instances, you may choose to request another payment method from your clients. For information on our other supported payment types, see Adding a client payment.

Declining FSA or HSA cards

You can process FSA (flexible spending account) and HSA (health savings account) cards in SimplePractice. HSA and FSA cards require that your business have a special MCC (Merchant Category Code) set so that card companies know that your products and services are directly related to a client’s medical needs. Online Payments accounts that are set up through SimplePractice are automatically assigned an HSA/FSA eligible MCC.

While Online Payments accounts are eligible to charge FSA and HSA cards, this doesn’t guarantee that these cards won’t be declined. Card issuers are still at liberty to authorize or decline any payment as they would with any other type of card. In these instances, please have your client contact their card issuer for more information.

Explaining decline errors when adding new credit cards

Each time a new card is added to a client’s file in SimplePractice, a $1 authorization charge is run on the card. This isn’t an actual charge, but a temporary authorization held by our payment processor to verify that a client’s card account is active and valid for future transactions.

Card issuers are still at liberty to decline these authorization attempts for the same reasons they may decline normal charges. In the event that this authorization charge is declined, a decline message will appear on the screen and the card won’t be saved to the client’s file. If this happens, we recommend having your client contact their card issuer for more information.

If the authorization is successful, the $1 transaction will be listed as pending on the client’s bank statement. If the charge doesn’t reverse after 7 business days, please submit a help request so our team can assist you further.