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 walks 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

Generate a Disbursement Summary report to reconcile negative disbursement totals.

Audience

Merchants

Environment(s)

Portal (Production)

Prerequisites

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

Warnings

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 reconciling the correct entries.

Warning: Each user can 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 might 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

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 called at any time while available. Each report shown on this page displays an expiration date for 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 versus 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, used 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, used by Merchants under Net Billing.

Reconcile with a Disbursement Summary Report

Ensure that you complete all steps in the following sections.

Access the Reports Page

Click the PLUS icon next to Reports in the left navigation panel to open a dropdown menu.
Click Create Reports in the Reports dropdown menu to open the Reports page.

Configure your Disbursement Summary Report

From the Select Report dropdown, select Disbursement Summary Report.
Select Include all up-to-date data.
In the Report Date dropdown, select Today for daily reconciliation.
(Optional) In the Templates dropdown, select a previously saved report template or create a new one from the parameters being set by clicking Add Template.
(Optional) In the Filter By dropdown, you can optionally add a filter for Divisions, Merchants, or include both.
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.

Generate your Disbursement Summary Report

Click Generate Report to begin generating your Disbursement Summary Report.
Click the CSV or XLS download icon in the upper-right corner of the page to download the report to an Excel-readable format for manual reconciliation outside of the portal or to import it into your preferred accounting software.

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

Reconcile your Negative Disbursement

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.)
Use the corresponding Entity ID and Entity Name column information to confirm that the negative disbursement is associated with the correct entity.
Investigate each amount displayed in the shown Refunds and Disputes columns to better understand the reason(s) for each negative disbursement.
Add the totals of the Refunds and Disputes column values to calculate your “expected total” for the given negative disbursement.
Compare your “expected total” against the Total column to check for any discrepancies.
- No Discrepancies: If the disbursement totals have no discrepancies, you can finalize and complete your reconciliation process.
- Disbursement Discrepancy: If you identify any discrepancies in the disbursement total comparison process, proceed to the next step.
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 disbursement 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.