Overview

    At the end of each period, you should reconcile two things as it relates to electronic payments.

Procedure

1)  The reporting for credit cards in Cloud Retailer against your credit card statements from your payment processor and

2)  The credit card company's statements against the amount of money deposited in your bank account.

For purposes of this article, we'll only be speaking to point 1 above.

Discrepancies are rare however they do occasionally occur.  Examples are when fairly odd transaction sequences occur - for example, you have a $100 transaction where you pay with one Visa (credit card based) gift card for $20 and the remainder on a second credit card ($80).  You process the gift card, it works fine, then you try to complete the remainder on the customer's regular credit card - it's declined.  In this scenario, with some credit card processors we need to get an approval to reverse the first portion of the payment ($20) and it declines the reversal.

Why does it decline the reversal in this instance?  Because of the magic of credit card processing...  Each processor is different.  More and more these systems are being enabled with artificial intelligence that's designed to reduce fraud and the results in odd cases is somewhat unpredictable.  In a scenario like this, the system has no choice and the only action you can take is to call the processor to find out the specifics and deal with them directly.  This is an example where your reporting in Cloud Retailer can vary.  The good news is that at the POS when something like this occurs Cloud Retailer tells that something went wrong (although not necessarily why).

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Typically we see users reconciling the reporting in CR against the monthly statements from payment processors though if you can do it more often via a processor's online reporting data we strongly recommend it.  Weekly is optimal.  The problem with doing it monthly is that if you find a problem it's likely too late to do anything about it.  A credit card that may have gotten an approval might be canceled 30 days later.  Especially if the end customer is attempting to defraud you.  Resolving problems quickly with credit/debit payments is KEY.  If you see one of those messages at the POS you should call your payment processor the same day.

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To view the reporting in Cloud Retailer go to reports > Advanced Credit Card Processing Details.  

The report will default to credit cards that back batched in the last 30 days.  If you have not settled credit cards at the POS they will NOT show up by default in this report.  You can modify the filters to use transaction time instead if you'd like - at which point it will show you data based on when the transactions occurred instead.

The purpose of filtering based on batch settlement is specifically so that you can reconcile to payment processor statements as they typically lump data based on the batch.  Additionally, the report is grouped by batch - for many processors, this should make it simple to line-by-line compare (in red below). 

Additionally, if you want to see the specific details of each credit card in the batch you can expand it (orange above).  Lastly, if you want to change how the report is grouped or filtered to more directly align it to how your processor's statements look, you should be able to.  Bookmark it in your browser so you can come back to it the way you left it later on.

Average Time to Complete

This depends on the number of items needing to be corrected.