Lynnbrook
Fund at Booking v. Fund at Arrival
Lynnbrook supports a "fund at arrival" model that will allow any users to process credit cards but hold the guest's money until the booking arrival. This allows new users to start building their own reputation and processing history right off but helps fight fraud in the industry.
With good history, the funding method is later changed to "fund at booking" and your money is deposited right away. Lynnbrook Group CC processing can be approved as Fund at Booking, or Fund at Arrival.
- Fund at Booking - the payment made by the guest is deposited to the client's bank account within a few days after it is made.
- Fund at Arrival - the payment made by the guest is deposited to the client's bank account within a few days after the guest arrives to begin their booking, which could be months or years after the payment was actually made by the guest.
Their default is Fund at Arrival as it is a much lower level of underwriting (risk to Lynnbrook), therefore much faster to approve. Lynnbrook seemed to indicate they believe people are happy with this. Generally Lynnbrook does not inform new clients that there is any other way allowed.
In reality, a client can request to pursue the higher order underwriting in hopes of qualifying for Fund at Booking. They should still be able to pursue this even if already approved for Fund at Arrival. There is no guarantee they will be granted Fund at Booking, but if they aren't, there's no harm done - they'll just stay with Fund at Arrival as they were before.
If a client is approved for Fund at Arrival, they can request the account be set to have the CC processing fee also billed at arrival. The system defaults to charge them the processing fee at booking time. This does mean that the client will be paying processing fees for payments that have been made, months or years before they actually receive any of the payment money themselves.
Lynnbrook plans on allowing Security Deposit holds as they had done in the past, but this has been planned for a long time and has required more development work than expected, and there is no ETA for this capability.
Net Billing v. Gross Billing
Lynnbrook has two methods of charging fees:
- Net Billing, which deducts the fee at the same time as the deposit
- Gross Billing, which deducts all the fees for one month on the first day of the following month.
Missing Processing Fees (Fund at Arrival)
When a Lynnbrook account is "Fund at Arrival", we do not know the fee at the time the payment is collected (their API doesn't give it to us). We only discover the fee on first of the next month when the gross fees withdrawal occurs (if Gross Billing).
To research why they are not showing in OwnerRez, you have to find the last "deposit" that contains those fees. For example, if the payments in question were collected in April, the fees should have been withdrawn from the user's bank account on May 1.
The "deposits" we're discussing here are not actual funds having been deposited to the host's bank account. Rather, these are the Lynnbrook fees charged to the host.
If you see no deposit for that date, it is likely that we missed it somehow on the import side. This can be caused by a few different reasons, but most commonly it's because Lynnbrook posted the settlement after we'd already looked for it. The solution is to use the purple "Import Deposit(s)" button on the Deposits page to look for it:
Doing that should create the missing deposit, resulting in those Lynnbrook fees now showing up on the bookings they were previously missing on.
If the deposit fails again, you should be provided with a reason. [[[[[ NEED TO INSERT SCREENSHOT ]]]]] If the reason for the failure is PM locked bookings, click the link provided to find out which bookings are holding things up. The PM lock must be removed from those bookings before you attempt to process the deposit again.
Before unlocking a PM locked booking, you must get consent from the user. They need to be aware that updating the deposit data on those bookings could result in changes that require them to delete the statement they were remitted on, and run it again. Generating the statement again will lock those bookings again automatically. If the statement does not need to be generated again, you can simply add the PM lock back to those bookings once the deposit has processed successfully.
"New Merchant Application" Name Mismatch
If Lynnbrook's team writes in to us saying that the name on their Finalize form doesn't match the application name, this generally falls into one of three scenarios:
- Owner application to add processor to PM's account
- Lynnbrook approved a closed user's account - a random name is generated
- The User ID and Application Key don't match - a random name is generated.
ORU Details needed
If Lynnbrook asks for ORU details to be provided so they can complete an account configuration, it is easiest to access that from the user's Inquiries or Affiliate page.
Impersonate then go to Inquiries, then click the link for Inquiry Setup
Copy the "orux" number from the User Level Email address:
Setting up Lynnbrook account
Lynnbrook usually sets these up, but sometimes we get tickets from Lynnbrook asking us to add the account for them which T2 can do. This video goes over how you can do that: https://www.loom.com/share/d5a2acd546f146149c6d77d2a1ac8be3