Reconciling Payments
Online payments for your Tentaroo and Form Builder transactions are processed through your payment processor, either Authorize.net or Stripe, and are posted to the accounting reports in Tentaroo. To reconcile transactions with your processor and your merchant account, download the Accounting Totals report bundle for the date range you need to review, up to 100 days at a time. This zip file of reports includes 7 reports:
- All Online Payments
- All Payments
- GL Account Transfers
- Online Payments by Date
- Online Payments by GL Account
- Audit Log
- Form Builder Payments
The first five reports on that list are based on the combined data of the Audit Log and Form Builder Payments reports. Those five reports are designed to make various accounting and reconciling processes easier.
Audit Log and Form Builder Payments
The Audit Log is a report that includes all transaction data for every purchase made in either the Events Module or the Facilities Module. It includes one line for every item purchased, such as event registration fees, classes with fees, products, and individual facilities purchased and their corresponding GL accounts.
The Form Builder Payments export is similar to the Audit Log, however it only includes one line per online payment.
All Online Payments
This includes one line per online payment, including payment method information and the payment amount as of the date the report was generated.
All Online Payments is useful for identifying individual transactions as well as to refine batch totals data when the Online Payments by Date report doesn't match your processor batch totals.
Discrepancies
Bounced eChecks: If an eCheck has bounced at the processor level, you will need to delete the eCheck payment and re-run this report for accurate data. Bounced eCheck payments can be deleted under the group's Previous Orders.
Refunded Credit Card Payments: If you have refunded a credit card payment through your processor, you can ignore the original online credit card transaction line on this report.
All Payments
This report is formatted exactly the same as All Online Payments, but it includes all At Council / Other payments and refunds from your Tentaroo data. It does not include any additional data from forms since offline payment information is not included in that data set.
Some councils find this report useful when they are tracking all payments made and want to see all the payment records in one place.
Online Payments by GL Account
You can keep track of how much money is coming in for each GL account during your reporting period using the Online Payments by GL Account report. This report consolidates all newly received online payment amounts applied to each GL into one line per account. Offline payments are not included here and should be tracked through the system that received them, like your POS.
The Deferred label is added to a GL account when the money was received prior to the year of the event or facility reservation. Some councils use separate deferred GLs, where they have one account to track deferred payments and another for current year payments. The Deferred label aims to help with that tracking, although it is primarily for Facility Reservations. With Events, you can reconcile payments through December and then swap the GL account. With Facilities, you cannot distinguish one GL for the current fiscal year and another GL for the next fiscal year, so this Deferred label helps you sort your payments and you can manually change the GL account on the reports.
You'll want to regularly update your account charts with this data so you can keep track of how much money has come in towards each event, form, or facility.
Discrepancies
Missing or Incorrect GL Number: If the first line of this report shows a zero in the GL Account # field, that means that there isn’t a GL assigned in the system to one or more items purchased during this time frame.
Use the Audit Log and Form Builder Payment reports to filter for lines with a zero in the GL Account # field. If more than one item - event, class, product, facility, or form - is missing a GL Account Number, the Online Payments by GL Account report will lump all payments together, so these items need to be corrected to be able to pull an accurate report.
To assign the correct GL in an Event or Facility, go to the item in the system and assign the GL account. Once updated, all previously purchased items will be automatically set to the correct GL, and you can pull a fresh Accounting Totals export.
The Form Builder does not automatically update prior transactions when you change the GL account number on the form, so to get the correct GL number in your accounting reports, you need to complete two steps:
- In the Editor, add or update a GL field on the form.
- Turn off “read only” temporarily so you can update your entries.
- Update all prior entries with the correct GL.
GL Account Transfers
Money in Tentaroo can move around between GL accounts as cancellations occur, creating credit on a group's account, and new purchases are made using that credit. Credit can also be removed from the system and returned to the group via refunds.
These changes to where money is applied are covered in the GL Account Transfers Report. Since this report tracks the flow of credit created and used, the original payments can come from any payment method, which is different from the Online Payments by GL Account report which only looks at new online payments. For example, if a check received through your POS is applied initially to a training event and the group cancels and applies that money toward summer camp, that transfer of funds is tracked in this report. This report does not include any Form Builder payment data since those payments are isolated and cannot be moved between forms.
The Transfer Amount column shows the total amount of money that was transferred in or out of the GL during the reporting time. This reflects the net change in funds, combining both credits and debits for that GL account. For example, if you have a transfer in of $500 and a transfer out of -$300, that line would show a total Transfer Amount of $200.
Discrepancies
Missing or Incorrect GL Number: This is the same as with the Online Payments By GL Account discrepancy, and can be corrected in the same way.
Online Payments by Date
This report is used to reconcile online payments received against your payment processor data.
It only includes online payments - your offline payments should be reconciled in the system they were processed through - and those online payments are summarized to give you a total amount received each day in Tentaroo and the Form Builder.
To use this data, pull the corresponding batch reports from your processor and compare those totals against the daily amounts in the Online Payments by Date report. If they match, you can reconcile your bank account using other reports from your payment processor that take into account any payment processing fees charged by the processor.
Discrepancies
In this case, there are several circumstances where batch totals might not match:
Transaction Cut-Off Time: Our report includes data from midnight to midnight, so in your payment processor, you need to set the Transaction Cut-Off Time to midnight in your timezone.
Sometimes, a transaction that comes in just after midnight gets included in the previous day's batch totals in your processor, while in Tentaroo, the payment is included for the day it was received.
If your batch totals don't match the processor's totals, refer back to the All Online Payments report to review transactions processed just after midnight for the day in question and the day after. It may help to run this report for an extra day to catch all potential discrepancies. Manually select a range of transactions in order to get a batch total that matches your processor data.
Bounced eCheck: If an eCheck has bounced in Authorize.net, it will not automatically update your system and needs to be deleted. Delete the bounced payment and run a fresh Accounting Totals export.
Online Credit Card Refund Issued: When you issue a refund online through your payment processor, your batch totals in their software will reflect that change, but the Tentaroo records will not, even if you have posted a refund to the group account. This is because you cannot reverse or delete a credit card payment in our software.
To adjust for this, refer back to the All Online Payments report and remove the original online payment manually from the exported data. Add the remaining payments received together to get an adjusted batch total.
Recurring Payments from Forms: It is possible to set up recurring payments in the Form Builder. For example, a donation form set up so users can initiate automatic monthly donations. In this case, only the first payment will be included in the export. Subsequent payments are processed by the payment processor but do not appear in Tentaroo’s reports. You’ll need to cross-reference processor data for full records.
Other System Data: When you are using your payment processor in multiple systems, such as another online payment portal or your POS, the Tentaroo Online Payments by Date batch totals will likely not match your daily batch totals from your processor.
Refer back to the All Online Payments report and compare each payment against the payments in your processor's batch. Hint: The payment processor data has a Description field. "Tentaroo" or "Form #999" both indicate new payments coming from Tentaroo or forms, while blank means recurring payments started in the Form Builder, and anything else comes from another payment portal.