Performing a full reconciliation

You can perform a full reconciliation to compare the transactions recorded by Vista with the amount your electronic-payment processor has deposited into your account.

This is important to make sure that you uncover any problems in payment processing and the funds-transfer chain, and avoid any irrecoverable financial or data loss.

Important! Vista recommends you perform a full reconciliation for every day.

Full reconciliation consists of two parts:

1. Reconcile Vista credit card transactions with transactions recorded by the credit card processor
2. Reconcile daily totals from your credit card processor with your bank statement

Your day is fully reconciled if both of these steps reconcile for that day.

Transactions check

Line-by-line, compare transactions recorded by Vista with those recorded by the credit card processor to identify discrepancies.

1. Generate a Vista report of credit card sales for the day.
2. From your credit card processor management portal, extract transaction data for the same day, plus a day on either side if needed.
   
   Note: Vista reports on the 24 hour day from 6am to 6am. The credit card processor usually has a different daily cycle. For example, they may report sales from midnight to midnight. For this reason extracting data for the day on either side makes sure you will have all the data for the day Vista has recorded.
   
   
3. Compare the two reports line-by-line. For every Vista record, there should be a corresponding record held by the credit card processor, and for every record held by the credit card processor there should be a Vista record.

   
   Tip! You may wish to invest in software that performs computerised matching on card sales data sourced from your point-of-sale vendor and your credit-card processor. If you run a small-scale operation you may choose to reconcile manually from printed reports, or alternatively by importing data into a spreadsheet.

Bank-deposits check

Compare your bank deposit amounts with the statements or reports that are available to you from your credit-card processor. There is no Vista information used during this step.

See Also:

Performing an approximate reconciliation

Settlements

Diagnosing reconciliation discrepancies

Running the Electronic Payments report