Green Fees

Shift4 puts the PGA's credit-card transaction
processing on par
by Jennifer Wilck, Contributing Editor, Retail Systems Reseller

What does a large  hotel chain have in common with the Professional Golf Association (PGA)? According to Shift4 Corporation, Las Vegas, the  provider of credit-card and  transaction-processing technology, a lot.

"Hotels deal with multiples. In one location they have retail shops, in another they have restaurants," says J.D. Oder, II, vice president, research and development and CIO of Shift4. "We took the same technology and grew it into geographically dispersed locations. We then jumped from huge hotels to the PGA that has clubs around the U.S. The technology is similar, with some new twists."

Shift4 adapted its core product, $$$ IN THE BANK, and built a Web-based thin application for archiving and transaction retrieving, which can also communicate with diverse systems at different locations.

Payment Processing Tees Off

"All credit-card system processing runs through one system, giving you economies of scale, speed and control," says Oder. "It's not cost effective to have leased lines at each club, because of the nature of the business—it's feast or famine. The PGA uses one centralized lease line at the corporate center and all systems funnel through it. Information is segmented by location and club. A browser auditing tool gives power to each club [for] transaction processing, but charge backs, reconciliation and corporate accounting is available to PGA corporate at the same time as it's available at each club."

The PGA corporate headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, uses $$$ IN THE BANK as its transaction engine and NetEnterprise to deliver distributed e-payment acceptance and browser-based management functions across geographic, business unit and technological boundaries. The corporate office runs NetEnterprise Server and connects to credit-card processors via lease line or dial up.

"Some clubs have certain relationships with banks, which vary," says Oder. "Our system facilitates this." The PGA is the first installation of NetEnterprise. It will expand to 44 clubs nationwide in the next year.

The $$$ IN THE BANK transaction engine runs on Microsoft Windows NT; an NT server runs Microsoft's SQL Server 7 and Internet Information Server 4. ColdFusion from Allaire Corporation, Cambridge, MA, supports geographically dispersed auditing and editing capability with its server-sided interface between the database and Web server. Each PGA club runs Shift4's NetAPI, which is the interface between Revelation POS from InfoGenesis, Santa Barbara, CA, and the corporate office. Communication takes place via TCP/IP. Each club uses Shift4's NetAudit, which provides auditing and management capabilities, allowing clubs to run reports, edit or delete errors, add transactions and settle batches over the Web.

"We're enabling a large enterprise to become its own application service provider," adds Oder.