Hi all
We are a retailer who process around 3000 customer invoices each week, with
our in-house CMS and order processing system.
We use FreeAgent to manage suppliers and the bills that they send us, but
we don’t create customer invoices on it. Things are working very well at
the moment, with the exception of two things relating to processing so many
card transactions.
Our Merchant Services provider pays batches of cash into our account, that
correspond with batches of customer invoices & refunds, paid by card. For
years we have had great difficulty reconciling these statements against our
own records (the Merchant Services firms never seem very keen to help
either!)
I am considering looking to the FreeAgent API, to see if it could help with
the 2 problems:
- Receiving the payments up to a week after the transaction date, means
that a cash-accounting system is awkward to manage (as this should
correspond with exact VAT quarters i.e. 1st Jan to 31st March but payments
for this quarter arrive around 7th Jan to 7 April)
- Checking that the actual batches correspond with the transactions on
our system is very difficult i.e.checking that our EPOS is correctly
charging cards is difficult
My idea:
- Create 5 new accounts for each of our 3 Merchant Services accounts,
one for cash and one for cheque
- Hook-up our order & refund processing system to the API, for each
transaction, add an entry to the account, with the appropriate net and vat
values
- Use these for our VAT cash-accounting system
I know that this sounds a bit crude at this stage, but I wondered if anyone
has done anything like this themselves?
Many thanks
Richard
Hi Richard,
If the goal is just to check that your merchant account provider is not
defrauding you then I wouldn’t clutter up your FreeAgent account with the
thousands of transactions from your EPOS system.
If your EPOS system outputs a report could you total the transactions
between the dates covered by the payment from your merchant account? If
so, you could then find the Bank Transaction in FreeAgent which corresponds
to the money in from your merchant services provider. With this Bank
Transaction, you can then create a single Bank Transaction Explanation to
explain it (either manually or using the API). If the amount from the
merchant services provider is different to the total of your transactions
FreeAgent will show an “unexplained amount” for the difference which will
be very clear in your FreeAgent bank account.
Kind regards,
GraemeOn Tuesday, 30 July 2013 11:58:20 UTC+1, Richard Davies wrote:
Hi all
We are a retailer who process around 3000 customer invoices each week,
with our in-house CMS and order processing system.
We use FreeAgent to manage suppliers and the bills that they send us, but
we don’t create customer invoices on it. Things are working very well at
the moment, with the exception of two things relating to processing so many
card transactions.
Our Merchant Services provider pays batches of cash into our account, that
correspond with batches of customer invoices & refunds, paid by card. For
years we have had great difficulty reconciling these statements against our
own records (the Merchant Services firms never seem very keen to help
either!)
I am considering looking to the FreeAgent API, to see if it could help
with the 2 problems:
- Receiving the payments up to a week after the transaction date,
means that a cash-accounting system is awkward to manage (as this should
correspond with exact VAT quarters i.e. 1st Jan to 31st March but payments
for this quarter arrive around 7th Jan to 7 April)
- Checking that the actual batches correspond with the transactions
on our system is very difficult i.e.checking that our EPOS is correctly
charging cards is difficult
My idea:
- Create 5 new accounts for each of our 3 Merchant Services accounts,
one for cash and one for cheque
- Hook-up our order & refund processing system to the API, for each
transaction, add an entry to the account, with the appropriate net and vat
values
- Use these for our VAT cash-accounting system
I know that this sounds a bit crude at this stage, but I wondered if
anyone has done anything like this themselves?
Many thanks
Richard