SmartVista transactions are records of card and account activity that are generated and processed according to the logic of the transaction life cycle that depends on the transaction type. As described in the Principles of Operation chapter, a typical card related transaction life cycle includes the authorisation stage and the financial processing stage. The authorisation stage deals with authorisations, pre-authorisations and sales slips (vouchers) and is processed by SmartVista Front-End. The financial processing stage deals with financial messages exchanged with Card Schemes via the Clearing Interfaces and involves the generation and processing of account postings in SmartVista Back-Office. Authorisation records are also used at this stage for matching with incoming financial messages and creating outgoing messages. These account postings are also referred to as Back-Office transactions or simply transactions, especially when the context of discussion is restricted to the Back-Office. They include ledger postings that involve actual transfer of funds and are subsequently included in the outgoing Banking System interface file (or, if incoming, arrive with the incoming BS interface file), and non-ledger postings, such as those spawned by authorisations where the transaction amount is only posted to the Held Amount sub-account and will not affect the account's Ledger Balance until the corresponding financial message is received and cleared.

SmartVista Back-Office account postings are accumulated in the Transaction Warehouse, with a unique system-assigned Transaction Number; All transactions are indexed as Acquirer or Issuer, including Us-on-Us transactions, and are also tagged with marked a Transaction Type attribute that serves as informs the system as to how this transaction must be processed according to the preconfigured Processing Rules.

The Transaction Warehouse format is based on the ISO 8583 standard. Some additional information is included, such as record insertion date, manual processing/review code, and transaction status: auth-record, presentment, disputed, etc.