Made a big purchase - haven't been charge 6 weeks on!

lipidicman

These things do turn up months later sometimes. Again, look at your receipt which should make it clear if the payment went through - in which case you will be charged eventually. I have had payments turn up after several months - and you are right, it is very annoying if it messes up you financial planning for that month! We have had them late (and with cryptic vendor names) and have reported them as fraudulent use of the card (until the matter was cleared up) - we even stopped a credit card once!

If it didnt go through then the company are unlikely to have your card number at all, and possibly their computer wont have debited the stock - so they may never find this error. However for this to be the case you either have no receipt, or the receipt would have to say cancelled

Curry_Queen

nh wrote:

I have to say I doubt if they will ever take the money. If there was a problem with the machine and the cashier thought the transaction had gone through, then they think you have paid. I am sure they don't waste their time trying to tally goods bought with money paid. How will this come to light?

That has to be one of the silliest things I've heard! I take it you don't know anything about accounting

A company audit will show up the missing payment and they will track it down and will recover it.

lipidicman

Pretty much what I was saying above! I thought it was silly too, comapnies dont make money by not checking the books!

dennyp_3

I don't think you will be charged, big companies like b & q make mistakes all the time if they charged you twice I doubt they would contact you.

they may track it down but doesn't mean they will recover the money, its in your hands so you make the choices.

Its a bit like if I paid in cash left the money on the counter and no one picked it up and its still there months later, if i was you keep it in your pocket untill needed.

Places don't give out goods untill there paid for so they must have thought your payment had been taken.

davidcampbell

Places don't give out goods untill there paid for so they must have thought your payment had been taken.

they dont have to take the payment straight away though, they only need it authorised. if they have an authorisation they would be happy to give out the goods.

nh

Curry_Queen wrote:

That has to be one of the silliest things I've heard! I take it you don't know anything about accounting

A company audit will show up the missing payment and they will track it down and will recover it.

Er, no, I don't know anything about accounting!

I was just saying that if the payment hadn't gone through properly ie, the card details hadn't been taken, then how could they track it down? But it seems on the receipt it does have the card number therefore b&q must have the card number therefore it will be easy to track down.

VH was suggesting that the machine was broken and hadn't recorded the transaction but now we know that is not the case.

Curry_Queen

davidcampbell wrote:

they dont have to take the payment straight away though, they only need it authorised. if they have an authorisation they would be happy to give out the goods.

Exactly! The card must have been authorised for the transaction to have gone through, otherwise it would have declined payment and the OP wouldn't have been allowed to take the goods.

The company can take this amount whenever they wish, as they have already been given authorisation to do so, and it is the responsibilty of the customer to ensure funds are available in the account to enable them to do that.

I've had this happen on several occasions ... still have an outstanding transaction from 2 months ago ... and my bank assured me that the company will eventually apply the transaction at some point and the bank will have to honour it regardless of the funds available in my account. Any fees or interest then charged as a result of lack of funds will have to be paid.

I think someone has already mentioned that debts (which this would be) can be recovered up to 6 years later

Curry_Queen

nh wrote:

Er, no, I don't know anything about accounting!

I was just saying that if the payment hadn't gone through properly ie, the card details hadn't been taken, then how could they track it down? But it seems on the receipt it does have the card number therefore b&q must have the card number therefore it will be easy to track down.

VH was suggesting that the machine was broken and hadn't recorded the transaction but now we know that is not the case.

A record of the card number will have been retained regardless of whether the transaction was authorised or not. The receipt retained by B&Q will be filed and subsequent checks will be made when the anomaly shows up in the accounting process.

If the merchandisers were called to authorise the card (as appears to be the case here) then they would give the shop assistant an authorisation code which will be recorded against the transaction.

There is only one way the OP could have got his goods without having the transaction authorised and that's if the shop assistant allowed him to take them despite having the payment declined but then that would amount to fraud and deception, and possibly theft

student100

lipidicman wrote:

If it didnt go through then the company are unlikely to have your card number at all, and possibly their computer wont have debited the stock - so they may never find this error. However for this to be the case you either have no receipt, or the receipt would have to say cancelled

There is one other possibility, although I can't see why it would have happened. If the sale did go through correctly, you would be issued with a receipt, but then it would technically be possible for the till operator or store supervisor etc. to void the transaction. There will still be a record of the transaction in the system, but it will show as cancelled and they would never debit the card account. Also, the stock would still show as being in the store even though you may have taken it home with you. This sort of error would be very difficult for the company to trace, and they would have to put the loss of stock down as "shrinkage" - i.e. the mystery dissapearance of stock.

I expect it is unlikely this has happened in this case, although it is a possibility. This sort of thing is why where I worked in the past would only let supervisors void transactions and the original receipt must have been retained by the store and stapled to the void slip.

lipidicman

If a transaction has gone through then most stores I have worked in have to then do a credit refund to cancel it out. The void thing only came up for me if the transaction was incomplete, ie rejected. The customer then got a receipt clearly saying 'void' I think the OP would know if this was the case.