Customer bank statements FAQs

The following are questions that customers may ask regarding charges on their bank or credit card statements.

Why does my customer see a ‘recurring’ charge?

Depending on their bank, some customers may see a charge from your company marked as ‘recurring’ on their statement, even if you only charged their card once.

This happens in some cases when a card is originally saved on file and then charged later. To maintain PCI compliance, our payment processor Stripe cannot store CVC codes after initially verifying the customer’s card. So when a payment is made later with the saved card information, Stripe will mark the payment as ‘recurring’ so the bank knows why the charge request is missing that information.

To increase the likelihood that your charges will be approved, we mark all charges being made with a saved customer as ‘recurring’. This tells the bank that the CVC code isn’t present because the payment information was stored for recurring use.

The ‘recurring’ flag may show up on your customers’ statements, but doesn’t necessarily indicate the customer is subscribed to a recurring billing plan.

Read more about recurring charges on Stripe’s website.

Why is my customer seeing a $1 charge in their bank statement?

When a customer’s card information is collected in FareHarbor, our payment processor Stripe will send a request to their bank to verify the card. This initial request is usually $0, and is always reversed right away, so customers will likely never see it in their bank statement.

However, in some cases Stripe will send a $1 request instead. For example, this is the case if the first authorization fails or if the customer is using an American Express card, which may show up on a customer’s statement.

You can let your customer know that these requests are not charges and are always reversed. This is true regardless of whether the card is accepted or declined. Depending on the customer’s bank, it may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks for the request to be removed from the bank statement.

Read more on Stripe’s website.

Why is my customer seeing multiple charges on their bank statement?

Depending on their bank, some customers may see multiple pending charges on their bank statement when a credit card payment was attempted more than once (for example, if the card was declined and the customer used another method of payment to complete their purchase).

With each charge request, our payment processor sends an authorization to the customer’s bank to confirm the card is chargeable. In some cases, the charge may be declined. However, certain banks will still display these authorizations as pending charges on the cardholder’s statement, making it look like the charge wasn’t blocked.

Although we can’t control whether or not authorizations appear in a customer’s bank statement, you can almost always guarantee that these charges will be credited back to the customer and fall off the statement in a matter of days.

If your customer is still seeing multiple completed charges after several business days, please ask them to send a screenshot of their statement and contact FareHarbor Support so that we can investigate further.