How to Reconcile a Disbursement in the Portal

To understand why your disbursement didn't go out/why your disbursement failed and to follow up with troubleshooting, follow these steps:

1. Are there any disbursements being generated?

   One possibility of there being no Disbursement is that it was never generated. If your withdrawal schedule is set up but you didn’t intake any sales, then a Disbursement would not trigger.

   To confirm your disbursement has been generated:

   Step 1: Try to retrieve your Disbursement ID, otherwise, search for your Merchant ID (MID) in the Portal and review the Withdrawals tab in your Account Overview to see if there is any Disbursement containing the date or amount of the payout you’re referring to.

   Step 2: If there aren’t any disbursements, confirm you have taken any sales on your account by checking your Account Balance.

    

2. What is the disbursement’s status?

   The status of a Disbursement can sometimes be all you need to know about when the client can expect to receive your payout. The following statuses are as follows:

   • Requested: The disbursement request has been submitted to the processor so that it can go into the next status of Processing. If requested during a holiday/weekend then the status will not change until the next business date after the cutoff time.

   • Processing: The batched funds from the MID’s Payrix Account Balance and are currently pending to be to sent to the bank.

   • Processed: The funds have been successfully taken from the MID’s Payrix Account Balance and sent to your bank.

   NOTE: If the Disbursement is Processed but the client still claims that you have yet to receive it, provide them with the Trace Number located on the Disbursement so you can contact your bank to confirm if there are any delays.

   • Returned: The disbursement was rejected by the Customer or the bank.

   • Denied: A setting applied by a Payment Facilitator indicating the disbursement will not be honored.

   • Failed: Indicates there was a problem that occurred when submitting the funding file and the payment processor was not able to process the disbursement such as for insufficient funds.

    

3. Are the disbursements in any groups?

   Certain groups can impact whether or not a merchant will receive funds. The most common scenario is that the merchant is on a payment delay.

   Step 1: Search for the MID in the Portal and click on the Groups tab.

   Step 2: Confirm that the merchant isn’t on any payment delays; these are usually noted in the titles of the groups. For example, the 7-day Payout Delay group is: X

   NOTE: If the merchant is in the 7-day delay group, you will not receive your payouts until 7th business day passes from the date the payout was requested. For example, if the requested/created date of a Disbursement is 3/23/20, then you will not receive the funds until 4/2/20 (with 4/1/20 being the 7th business day).

4. Is your schedule active?

   Sometimes the issue can be tied to the fact that the merchant doesn’t have a withdrawal schedule set up on your account. Without a schedule put in place, any money you collect from sales will continue to add to your Payrix Account Balance until you have a withdrawal to pay out the balance.

   To confirm if a withdrawal is put in place on an account:

   Step 1: Search the MID in the Portal and take note of the Next Withdrawal section located at the top of the page. If you see $0.00 and no deposit date in that box, then the merchant does not have a withdrawal schedule put in place.

   Step 2: If there is a date in the Next Withdrawal box, then scroll down and click on the Withdrawals tab and click on the withdrawal to confirm if the schedule is active under the Status field.

   Step 3: If the withdrawal schedule is active, check to see what value is set in the minimum field and confirm if the merchant’s account balance is under that amount. There are times when, although the merchant has a withdrawal setup, you won’t receive a payout because the Payrix Account Balance didn’t meet the minimum amount required to trigger the schedule.

   NOTE: Viewing a Withdrawal Schedules page is a great place to troubleshoot to confirm if the schedule is active, meets the minimum requirement to trigger, or when the withdrawal is scheduled to run.

5. Did you have any ACH returns recently?

   If you have an ACH Returned then the only way you can resume payouts is if you update/change your bank account. If this does not occur then the client must speak with your bank to ensure you will not reject the disbursement and contact support@payrix.com to remove the block on your account.

   Step 1: Check the merchant Withdrawal History and see if you have had any recent Returned disbursements.

   Step 2: If the merchant has had a Returned disbursement check /entityReturns on the merchant entity to see if you have any active returns.

   Step 3: Set the entityReturn that is active to inactive (1), which will allow payouts to resume on the merchant account.

   NOTE: If there are multiple entityReturns that are active on the entity account then all of these will need to be set to inactive for the entity to receive payouts.

6. Is your bank account disabled?

   It's possible the account associated with the payout has been disabled, which would prevent future disbursements from processing.

   Step 1: Go to the Merchant Account Overview > Banking tab.

   Step 2: Validate that the account that failed to disburse is “Active”.

7. Are disbursements currently blocked for this merchant?

   If the merchant was placed in a blocked disbursements group, it won’t matter what schedule you have set; no disbursements will be issued and your account balance will continue to accumulate your sales without payout.

   Step 1: Search for the MID in the Payrix Portal.

   Step 2: Click on the Groups tab on your account overview page. If SPL/DEC - Block Disbursements is present, this means the merchant will not be able to retrieve your funds until the Risk team removes them from the group.

   Step 3: Consult with the Risk team for more details on why the merchant’s Disbursements are being blocked and relay the information to the client as needed.

8. Do you have any additional parameters?

   Parameters can be setup directly on an entity or via another group.

   To check for additional parameters:

   Step 1: Search for the MID and go to the Account Overview page

   Step 2: Check Parameters tab and see if any parameters are applied directly to the merchant. If the Parameters tab is not bolded then that is an indicator that no direct Parameters are applied on the merchant.

   Step 3: Check Groups tab and expand Parameters to see what groups are applying any settings.

   Step 4: Go to each group to see if there are any restrictions on payouts.

Disbursements may appear to be off in lower decimal places upon first glance. If you download the Disbursement Txn Report in XLS/CSV format under the Reports tab, you’ll be able to see the accurate reporting information for reconciliation. The reason you may not be able to see these decimal variances upon first glance is that they’re (typically) caused by rollovers (remainders), reserves, adjustments, and fee refunds.

A rollover (or remainder) is an account balance with a value that is less than one penny.

Example: $0.005

This can also be in the case of having a balance greater than one penny while also having a Rollover.

Example: $100.005 is one hundred dollars with a halfpenny [$0.005] rollover.

Because fees are assessed as less than a penny is represented, but not disbursed until another rollover can bring the total balance to a full penny. The most common reason a rollover will happen is a Fee being charged to a Merchant for access to the Referrer’s platform may result in fractions of or less than one penny, which cannot be represented in a traditional currency format, but will reflect in your Disbursement Txn Details Report.

A Reserve indicates money placed into reserve status by the Facilitator and/or Referrer’s platform requirements. Reserves appear as Fee credits or debits under the Disbursement Details section of Withdrawal Transactions.

Example:

A Referrer platform parameters require 20% of all Merchant funds will be in Reserve to handle chargebacks, disputes, and refunds without creating an overdraft fee.

The Merchant takes sets their withdrawal schedule to 100% daily, and the platform’s withdrawal schedule of the reserve funds is set to 100% monthly.

Due to the Reserve parameters in place, the Merchant will receive 100% of their non-reserved funds (80% of the transaction total) each day they withdraw, while the Referrer platform will hold the remaining reserve funds (20% of the transaction total).

If a Merchant were to download a Disbursement Txn Report prior to the end of the month when the Reserve is released, it would appear that their disbursement numbers may be off up to several decimal placements depending on the dollar value of all transactions.

Reserves happen when a Facilitator or Referrer sets parameters on their platform for Merchants.

Example:

Reserve Rule – 10% of all funds must be kept in reserves for one month to process potential refunds, chargebacks, and adjustments.

An Adjustment refers to the process of moving funds from one entity account to another. Adjustments appear as fee credits or debits under the Disbursement Details section of Withdrawal Transactions.

Adjustments happen when a merchant receives a miscellaneous refund from the Referrer and there is no correlated fee to charge the refund against. This adjustment will come from the Referrer-level Entity and be present in the Merchant Disbursement Txn Report.

A Fee Refund refers to the process of a Referrer refunding the cost of a fee to a Merchant. They may appear as Fee credits under the Disbursement Details section of Withdrawal Transactions.

Fee Refunds happen when a Merchant fee is charged by the Referrer but now needs to be processed as a refund to the Merchant at a later time due to a dispute, or other related fee issues.

Fee Refunds only differ from Adjustments in that they are categorized and systematically connected to a fee transaction that takes place between the Merchant and Referrer. So in most cases, a Fee Refund should not cause a disbursement reconciliation discrepancy.

Note: There are rare exceptions, such as processing a Fee Refund on a Friday evening. This transaction might appear on the Disbursement Txn Report if the report was pulled that Friday evening, but not actually reflect against your Transaction totals as the fee hasn't been processed over the weekend until the following Monday. This timing leaves potential room for a discrepancy based on the timing of the actual Fee Refund being received versus the final amount shown in the Disbursement Txn Report before the following business day.