Card Swiped, Signature Printed, But No Payment Recorded — Anyone Seen This Before?

Hey everyone — hoping someone here has run into this before and found a fix.

For the second time in as many days, one of my bartenders swiped a customer’s card to take payment. Everything seemed normal — the transaction went through, and a signature receipt printed out. But when they went to enter the tip, there was no trace of the payment in our system. It’s like it vanished.

There were no power outages, no error messages, and the receipt printed like it normally would. But the transaction doesn’t appear anywhere — no record, no credit card number, nothing to suggest the card was ever processed.

Has anyone experienced this before? If so, what was the cause or solution? I’m worried this could keep happening and we’ll keep losing money on unpaid tabs.

Thanks in advance.