Authorise an amount to capture later

You can authorise an amount on a customer's card and capture all or part of it later. This method also allows you to cancel an authorisation which is a much faster and effective method to return to your customers' money.

This is useful in many scenarios. For example:

• When your business is heavily based on fulfillment of products, you might want to avoid capturing until the products are fulfilled. This way, if you can't fulfil them, you can cancel the order and the money will be immediately liberated into your customer's account (instead of taking 5-7 days as it would with a normal refund).
• When your business requires to hold an amount of money for a service provided and at the end of the service provided you only take its final value (e.g. any form of equipment rental).

This page describes the process of capturing a payment manually. To capture an order automatically, set the capture_mode parameter to AUTOMATIC. The amount will be captured when the payment is authorised.

1. Create an order with capture_mode = MANUAL​

Create an order that will not be automatically captured after making a payment. To do so, set the capture_mode parameter to MANUAL in the body of the request.

2. Take a payment from a customer​

Follow the steps outlined in our previous tutorial to accept a card payment from your customer.

After taking the payment, you should have an order in AUTHORISED state.

3. Capture the payment​

To complete the payment use the Capture an order operation to take the amount that was authorised. To capture the full amount, send the request without a body.

Also, you can send an amount in the body of the request to capture a partial amount of what was originally authorised.

(Optional) Cancel the payment​

If you would like to return the full authorised amount to your customer, you can Cancel the order. The amount will be immediately voided and returned to your customer's original payment method.