Reviewing merchant statements and reconciling those statements to daily transaction records is an important part of being a credit card merchant. Reconciling merchant accounts on a monthly basis helps ensure that merchants receive the revenue for their sales, refunds are being managed appropriately and that all revenue and related fees are being deposited in the appropriate PTA. Reconciling also ensures that processing and Payment Card Industry (PCI) fees are being properly charged to the appropriate PTAs. Failure to reconcile accounts in a timely fashion can result in lost revenue.
Reconciling Merchant Account
Before You Start
It is important to understand the revenue flow and the systems from which you should run reports to verify that flow.
- Credit Card Merchant Bank: Verify your sales using the following reports.
- Gateway (such as Paypal) transaction reports by batch
- Terminal Batch Tapes
- Merchant Bank: Verify your sales data was accepted by the merchant bank using the following reports.
- Wells Fargo Clientline Reports for Visa, Mastercard and Discover transactions
- American Express Online Merchant Services Reports for AMEX transactions
- Wells Fargo Bank: For merchants that use their own bank accounts, verify merchant bank revenue, fees tied to credits and debits on your bank statements. Merchant Services (MS) manages this function for merchants that use the Stanford webcard bank.
- Stanford PTAs: Run Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) to verify revenue and fees are being allocated to the proper PTA.
- Make sure that sales records align with:
- The terminal batch tapes if using a terminal
- Or, your gateway transaction records if merchant transactions go through an online payment gateway
A “batch” is a group of transactions that are sent by your terminal or gateway to the merchant bank at the same time.
to verify that the transactions are successfully processed and deposited to the merchant bank
Run a transaction batch summary report from the payment gateway or review your terminal batch records
- Run a transaction batch summary report from the payment gateway or review your terminal batch records
- Run a transaction batch summary report from Wells Fargo Clientline/American Express Online Merchants (MFAS)
- For more information on American Express Online Merchants, refer to Resource: E-Commerce Merchants.
- Compare the reports
- Identify any discrepancies
- Research, investigate and resolve variances, such as chargebacks and rejected transactions
Variances caused by timing differences (the difference between when a transaction is processed and when the batch is received by the merchant bank) will resolve themselves in the following month
- Review the bank statements against the merchant reports to ensure that the revenue/fees are being properly credited/debited to the appropriate account MS performs this function for merchants that use Stanford’s merchant bank account.
- Run a fund statement in OBI each month to verify that their PTA(s) are being properly credited/debited for all card revenue/fees
For information about revenue and fund management reporting and in particular Fund Statements showing revenue and expense, use OBI Revenue and Fund Management Dashboard>Fund Statement Tab.
Learn more about OBI Financial Reporting.
