Unauthorized Transaction Recovery
A clearing sometimes arrives without a valid authorization to cover it in full: the authorization expired, the clearing settled for more than was authorized, or there was no authorization at all. Open Fabric raises a recovery case for the uncovered amount (the shortfall) and works it toward recovery or resolution on your behalf, following the recovery policies you configure.
Unauthorized Transaction Recovery is a feature of the Open Fabric portal. Your operations team configures the policies, reviews cases, and takes any manual action a case needs there. There is nothing to build or integrate to use it.
Why a case is raised
Every recovery case is raised for one of three reasons:
| Reason | Meaning |
|---|---|
No authorization (no_authorization) | The clearing arrived with no matching authorization at all. |
Authorization expired (authorization_expired) | The authorization existed but had already expired by the time the clearing arrived. |
Clearing exceeds authorization (clearing_exceeds_authorization) | The clearing amount is greater than the authorized amount. |
For the first two reasons there is no covering amount at all, so the whole cleared amount is the shortfall. For the third, the case is covered up to the authorized amount and the shortfall is the difference.
The authorized and cleared amounts on a case are in the transaction's original currency; the shortfall is in your billing currency. On a cross-border clearing the two are not directly comparable, so the shortfall is the figure that drives recovery.
Set up recovery policies
A recovery policy tells Open Fabric what to do with a case. You manage policies in the portal:
- Policies are evaluated in priority order, and the first match wins.
- A policy can match on merchant category code (MCC), transaction source, transaction category, or a merchant name pattern. A criterion left empty matches anything.
- Every tenant has a default policy, the catch-all that is evaluated last so every case reaches an outcome. It cannot be deleted or deactivated, but you can change what it does.
Each policy sets one of two primary handlings:
| Handling | What happens |
|---|---|
| Accept the difference | The shortfall is absorbed as a loss, and the case resolves immediately. You set a cap amount in your billing currency; shortfalls at or below the cap are accepted. |
| Charge the customer | Open Fabric attempts to charge your customer for the shortfall. |
A charge the customer policy has a few more settings:
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Grace period | How long to wait before the first charge attempt, so that a same-cycle refund or reversal can shrink or close the case first. Defaults to one hour. |
| Retry schedule | How often a declined attempt is retried: daily, every 2 days, or weekly. |
| Maximum attempts | How many attempts to make before giving up. |
| On failure | What to do once the attempts are exhausted without success: file a dispute with the card network for the shortfall, write it off, or leave it for manual review, in which case the case stays in charge failed and waits in the action queue for your team to decide. |
How a case progresses
Case statuses
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Detected | Case raised, not yet evaluated against a recovery policy. |
| Accepted | The shortfall was accepted per policy. No charge is attempted. |
| Charging customer | A charge attempt is scheduled or in flight. |
| Recovered | A charge succeeded and the shortfall was collected. |
| Charge failed | The retry schedule was exhausted without a successful charge. |
| Dispute filed | Escalated to a network dispute for the shortfall. |
| Recovered via dispute | The escalated dispute recovered the shortfall. |
| Customer disputed | Your customer disputed the recovery charge with you. Charging halts pending your review. |
| Refunded | A refund or reversal on the original transaction closed the shortfall, so no charge was needed. |
| Written off | The shortfall was written off, manually or per policy. |
Accepted, recovered via dispute, refunded, and written off are final. A recovered case can still move to customer disputed if your customer disputes a charge that already succeeded.
When a refund, clearing reversal, or authorization reversal lands on the original transaction while a case is open, Open Fabric re-evaluates the shortfall: it can shrink the case, or close it as refunded if the shortfall is fully covered. It never increases a case.
Work cases in the portal
Action queue
The case list groups cases into buckets, shown as tabs and as the summary tiles at the top of the page:
| Bucket | What it contains |
|---|---|
| Needs action | Cases waiting on your team: charge failed, customer disputed, and any case flagged as billing unavailable. |
| In progress | Accepted, charging customer, and dispute filed. |
| Resolved | Recovered, recovered via dispute, refunded, and written off. |
| Detected | Cases not yet evaluated against a policy. |
Needs action is an overlay across all statuses rather than a status of its own, so a case that needs attention also appears in whichever other bucket its status belongs to. Note that accepted counts as in progress rather than resolved: the outcome is decided, but it is grouped with the cases your team may still want to review.
Each case shows the transaction and customer it belongs to, the reason it was raised, the amounts involved, the policy it matched, how many charge attempts have been made, and a full history of its status changes, with the operator's note on every manual action.
Manual actions
From a case, your team can:
| Action | Effect |
|---|---|
| Accept the difference | Absorb the shortfall and resolve the case as accepted. |
| Retry charge | Make another charge attempt now, for example after a failed charge or once a customer has topped up. |
| Cancel charge | Stop an in-flight charge schedule before it exhausts on its own. |
| File a dispute | Raise a network dispute for the shortfall. The case links to a draft dispute in Chargeback Management, where your team completes and submits it. The case also shows the latest date a dispute can still be filed. |
| Write off | Close the case as written off. |
| Record a customer dispute | Note that your customer disputed the recovery charge with you. Any further charge attempt stops and the case moves to needs action for your review. Available while the case is charging, recovered, or charge failed. |
Every action takes an optional note, which is kept on the case's history.
Dashboard
The recovery dashboard summarises how recovery is performing for the last 30 days, quarter to date, and year to date: cases detected, cases recovered, the amount recovered, the amount written off, and the recovery rate (cases recovered divided by cases detected). It also shows where open cases sit right now, by status, and how each mismatch reason resolves (recovered versus written off).
A charge against your customer for a shortfall runs entirely inside Open Fabric. It has no card network rail of its own, so it is never present in a clearing file or settlement report. The recovery case in the portal is where you see it.