Use Case: Reconcile Negative Disbursements with a Disbursement Summary Report

You can generate a Disbursement Summary Report to manually reconcile negative disbursements like you would typical withdrawal disbursements, identifying a negative total amount for the disbursement. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to generate a new Disbursement Summary Report to perform a manual reconciliation of the negative total.

A view of the Reports page generating a Disbursement Summary Report using the “Include all up-to-date data” option and the “Advanced Filters” set to display Refunds and Disputes column data.

Objective

Use the Portal to generate a Disbursment Summary report to reconcile negative disbursement totals.

Audience

Merchants

Environment(s)

Portal (Production)

Prerequisites

Your Merchant, Referrer or Facilitator account must be fully boarded.
Live or test data must be processed through the platform to be available to report.

Warnings

Warnings will provide insight or advice to avoid risk, visibility, and overall product performance issues during this use case.

Warning: Negative Disbursements are typically the result of refunds or “Lost” chargeback disputes. Be sure to verify each entry thoroughly.

Warning: When performing a manual reconciliation of your negative disbursements, be sure to verify your calculations to mitigate errors in determining your expected totals.

Warning: Verify time periods, shown under the Date column of the Disbursement Summary Report to ensure you are reonciling the correct entries.

Warning: Each user may have a different specific reconciliation process, some manually, and some through other accounting software. This guide covers the manual reconciliation process and the general flow to perform a reconciliation and may vary when importing into Accounting software.

Warning: Certain Interchange Fees that amount to less than a full cent ($0.01) will be displayed under Not Disbursed on a Disbursement Summary, as an undisbursed amount rollover.

Tips

Tips will provide suggestions to streamline or better prepare you to apply this use case tutorial.

Tip: A negative disbursement is a debit from your entity’s bank account as the result of owed amounts not being covered by your account balance.

Tip: If you create filters for a report that you will regularly generate, be sure to save it as a Template under the Templates dropdown available on the page to automatically recall your report filtering settings from the previously generated report.

Tip: All of your previously generated reports for a limited time period will be available in the Report History page to be recalled at any time while available. Each report shown on this page will display an “Expiration Date” when it will no longer be available.

Tip: Regular reconciliation of negative disbursements is crucial to maintaining accurate financial records.

Additional Resources

See the tips below to help you get started.

See Reporting Values for a table with descriptions of data shown on various reports to help better interpret the report for reconciliation.

Note: Reconciliation vs. Balancing

Reconciliation is the process of comparing your financial records, usually over a longer period, to ensure that the withdrawn amount matches the intended disbursement amount, utilized by Merchants under Statement (Gross) Billing.

Balancing is the process of maintaining financial equilibrium by verifying that your total daily disbursements align with your available balance and financial goals, utilized by Merchants under Net Billing.

Reconcile with a Disbursement Summary Report

1: Access the Reports Page

Step 1: Click the PLUS icon next to Reports in the left-hand navigation panel to open a drop-down menu.
Step 2: Click Create Reports in the Reports drop-down menu to open the Reports page.

2: Configure your Disbursement Summary Report

Step 1: From the Select Report dropdown, select Disbursement Summary Report.
Step 2: For “How would you like to generate your report?”, select “Include all up-to-date data”.
Step 2: In the Report Date dropdown, select Today for daily reconciliation.
Step 3: (Optional) In the Templates dropdown, select a previously saved report template or create a new one from the parameters being set by clicking the “Add Template” button within.
Step 4: (Optional) In the Filter By dropdown, you can optionally add a filter for Divisions, Merchants, or include both.
Step 5: Click Advanced Filters in the upper right to add the following data columns to the Disbursement Summary report that are recommended for manual reconciliation:
- Refunds - Disbursement totals from a payment return or fee refund.
- Disputes - Disbursement totals from “Won” or “Lost” chargeback disputes.

Result: Your Disbursement Summary Report is now configured and ready for you to generate.

3: Generate your Disbursment Summary Report

Step 1: Click the Generate Report button to begin generating your Disbursement Summary Report.
Step 2: Click the CSV or XLS download icon in the upper right-hand corner of the page to download the report to an Excel-readable format for manual reconciliation outside of the Portal and/or import it into your preferred accounting software.

Result: You have downloaded the Disbursment Summary Report and are ready to reconcile your most recent negative disbursement amounts for the day manually or import it into another software.

4: Reconcile your Negative Disbursment

Step 1: Create a filter for the Total column to isolate any negative amounts in a spreadsheet viewer, such as Excel. (“Total is less than $0.00.”)
Step 2: Use the corresponding Entity ID and Entity Name column information to confirm that the negative disbursment is associated with the correct entity.
Step 3: Investigate each amount displayed in the shown Refunds and Disputes columns to better understand the reason(s) for each negative disbursment.
Step 4: Add the totals of the Refunds and Disputes column values to calculate your “expected total” for the given negative disbursement.
Step 5: Compare your “expected total” against the Total column to check for any discrepancies.
- No Discrepancies: If there are no discrepancies in the disbursment totals, you can finalize and complete your reconciliation process.
- Disbursment Discrepancy: If you identify any discrepancies in the disbursement total comparison process proceed to Step 3.
Step 6: Using the corresponding Date, Entity ID, and Entity Name column information, investigate and resolve any issues causing discrepancies including missed transactions or calculation errors.

Note: If you identify any calculation errors from the platform, contact Support for assistance in resolving the error.

Result: After resolving any discrepancies, you can finalize your negative disbursment totals and complete the reconciliation process to save for your records.

Conclusion

When the Report has finished being generated, you can use the data in a variety of ways to help improve your business or just for metrics tracking.

The Disbursement Summary Report will also be made available under the Report History page until the expiration date that is displayed on the page.