When you make a card transaction, the payment is processed in 2 main parts: authorisation (holding of funds) and settlement (final decrease of account balance). During this process, Vivid relies on the merchant with whom the payment was made to collect the authorised funds that have been set aside for them.

Oftentimes, the merchant doesn’t process the second part of the payment process in a timely manner and, as a result, the held funds are released before the settlement comes. The charge will appear in your Timeline at a later date.

Even though the funds were reserved from your account when you made the purchase and they were ready to be debited (pre-authorisation), the merchant failed to do so and the funds were released. Therefore, the merchant eventually reports the charge to us and the funds are finally debited.

By going through your Timeline in the Vivid app, you’ll be able to see that the merchant didn’t actually process the charge at the original time of the purchase and therefore your balance didn’t change.

If you believe the charge is incorrect or you don’t recognise the transaction, please check out this article.