Process family
Card payment lifecycle: five templates from initiation to reconciliation
The life of a card transaction as five linked flowcharts: card payment initiation, authorization, the transaction state model, clearing and settlement, and payment reconciliation, plus tokenization and exception management.
A card payment lives through a fixed set of states (initiated, authorized, captured, cleared, settled, funded, reconciled), and no single participant sees all of them: merchant, gateway or processor, acquirer, network, issuer and settlement bank each own a part. This family orders the five templates that follow one transaction through those states, and adds the tokenization and exception management templates that protect and repair it.
The card payment flowchart covers the live purchase conversation: payment-data capture, local controls, the issuer's response and the merchant's decision to proceed, cancel or hand off to capture. Payment authorization is the same handoff from the processing side, with authentication and risk screening kept apart from the issuer decision and one attempt reference preserved through response, timeout inquiry and capture.
The card transaction lifecycle is the state model that holds all of it, with capture wait, merchant cancellation and natural expiry as distinct paths. Clearing and settlement turns accepted capture records into exchanged clearing messages, issuer and acquirer positions, settlement instructions and merchant funding, and payment reconciliation proves the internal records agree with gateway, acquirer, network and bank evidence, giving every difference an owner.
The failures are mostly ambiguity about state: a timeout treated as a decline and retried, so the cardholder is charged twice; a capture submitted against an expired authorization; a settlement file with one record more than the ledger and no owner for the difference. Authorization's unknown-outcome inquiry on the original reference and tokenization's guarded retry stop the duplicate charge; the lifecycle makes expiry an explicit state, not an absence; payment reconciliation gives each classified difference a correction-and-rematch route; and exception management confirms a failed, duplicate or timed-out payment's true state before anyone acts.
Three things have no template of their own here. Payer authentication (3-D Secure, strong customer authentication) is a stage inside the authorization and transaction risk assessment templates rather than a separate flowchart; capture is the handoff at the end of authorization and a state in the lifecycle; and bank-transfer and marketplace payouts are not in the library at all. What happens when a settled transaction is questioned is disputes and chargebacks, and the merchant whose transactions these are was admitted and is watched under merchant onboarding and risk.
The sequence
Step 1: Card payment process flowchart (purchase response to capture)
Card payment process flowchart for purchase initiation, secure data capture, authorization response, merchant proceed-or-cancel action, release messaging and capture handoff.
Step 2: Payment authorization process flowchart (request to capture)
Payment authorization process flowchart for data validation, authentication and risk controls, request routing, issuer response, unknown-outcome inquiry and capture handoff.
Step 3: Card transaction lifecycle flowchart (initiation to monitoring)
Card transaction lifecycle flowchart for definitive or unknown authorization outcomes, reference-based status inquiry, capture, clearing, settlement, funding and closure.
Step 4: Payment clearing and settlement process flowchart template
Payment clearing and settlement process flowchart for record validation, position calculation, fund movement, merchant funding, mismatch investigation and approved correction posting.
Step 5: Payment reconciliation process flowchart (records to settlement)
Payment reconciliation process template for complete source capture, transaction and settlement matching, difference classification, controlled correction, rematch and audit evidence.
Also part of this family
- Payment tokenization process flowchart template — Payment tokenization process template for approved capture, controlled token creation, original-reference status inquiry, safe reuse or retry, tokenized authorization and audit records.
- Payment exception management process flowchart (detect to close) — Payment exception management template for state confirmation, categorization, ownership, communication, safe retry or correction, reconciliation, escalation and trend closure.