When can I expect my batch settlements to be deposited in my bank account?¶

• Bankcard and credit card activity is routed to the church’s bank account within two business days after settlement.

• Virtual Check activity is routed to the church’s bank account within 5 days of settlement.

• Funds are not processed during weekends and federal holidays.

Example #1 Bankcard/credit card - Weekday (Non-holiday)

• Batch is settled Monday night (Non-holiday).

• Funds are processed by the acquiring bank (Sage/TransNational) the following Tuesday (Non-holiday).

• Funds are received in the church’s bank account the following Wednesday morning (Non-holiday).

Example #2 Bankcard/credit card - Weekend (Non-holiday)

• Batch is settled Friday night (Non-holiday) as well as Saturday and Sunday night.

• No funds are processed over the weekend.

• Funds are processed by the acquiring bank (Sage/TransNational) the following Monday (Non-holiday).

• Funds from Friday’s, Saturday’s and Sunday’s batches are received in the church’s bank account the following Tuesday morning (Non-holiday).

Example #3 Bankcard/credit card - Weekend plus holiday

• Batch is settled Friday night (Non-holiday) as well as Saturday, Sunday and Monday (Monday being a Federal holiday).

• No funds are processed over the weekend, or Monday when it is a Federal holiday.

• Funds are processed by the acquiring bank (Sage) the following Tuesday.

• Funds from Friday’s, Saturday’s, Sunday’s and Monday’s batches are received in the merchant’s bank account the following Wednesday morning.

Virtual Terminal¶

If you use Sage Payments as your processor, you will have access to their Virtual Terminal. From there you can download a deposit and fees report which will help you reconcile everything.

TransNational has a similar site where you can download this information.

Failed Recurring Giving Transactions¶

When the batch service is run on your database each morning to process recurring giving for that day, if a transaction fails, the processor lets us know (along with the reason). We pass that information on to the church in the form of a Failed Recurring Giving Notice email. The subject of the email will be Recurring Giving Failed on… followed by the URL for your church’s TouchPoint database. The body of the email will contain a link to the transaction and the link will also include the reason for the failure. Your System Admin can also choose to enable Failed Gift Tasks to automatically create a task when a recurring gift fails to process for the first time.

Examples:

• message: UNABLE TO PROCESS, tranid:213688

• message: DECLINED, tranid:456688

• message: EXPIRED CARD, tranid:65893

Other Failed Online Transactions¶

When a one-time giving donation or an online registration payment fails due to insufficient funds or an incorrect bank account/routing number or perhaps even a hold on a bank account, these will be processed as usual when the transaction is made online. If it is a donation it will appear in the online Bundle for that day and will be recorded on the person’s giving record. The processor (Sage, TransNational, or Authorize.net) has no knowledge at this point of any of these things that would cause the failure. These are just like a returned check and should be treated as such.

Each payment processor is different, but you probably have the option to receive email notices from your processor for each failed transaction like this or turn those off. You can also go to your payment processor’s virtual terminal and download the EFT Rejects report.

It is your decision how you want to manage these:

• As they occur In this case, you would want to receive the email notices from Sage/TransNational and mange these each time you receive an email for each individual failed transaction.

• Weekly or monthly If you prefer to handle these on a schedule, you would do this using the EFT Rejects report on your payment processor’s website.

Whenever you choose to manage failed transactions, you should follow the instructions for Returned Checks to manage the TouchPoint portion of this. Remember, you also need to account for these returns in your GL.

General Ledger and Online Processing¶

Any time you have online payments and/or online giving you will have a little more difficulty devising a pattern for entering receipts into your General Ledger and reconciling your bank account. That said, the benefits to the church normally will far outweigh this issue. Work with your CPA to develop a process that works for you. We are not giving accounting advice, merely giving you tools to get the information you need from TouchPoint for your GL and for your bank reconciliation. Also, we are presenting in this document some information regarding when money gets put into your bank. We have not control over that process, nor do we ever receive information regarding when that happens.

TouchPoint receives Batch Settlement dates from the payment processor. This does not happen until you select Use Batch Dates for a given date range on the Transactions Log. The Batch Date is the date that the processor (Sage, TransNational, or Authorize.net) settled the transaction. This means that the processor received the money in its bank for that transaction. In order for you to get that information you will use the Transactions Log and check the box Use Batch Dates.

You can then generate the Reconcile Report (using Batch Dates) and use it to match items that are showing as cleared in your bank account. The items on the Reconcile Report will have a matching total in your bank account. The Reconcile Report may have items that have settled with your processor, and that have not yet be deposited into your bank account.

The typical TouchPoint client church will post entries to their GL for income, both donations and payments for online registrations, either weekly or monthly. The Totals by Fund Report provides the information for all donations and the Totals by Description Report provides the information for all payments. Some churches use a different bank account for their online receipts. Therefore, you can choose to generate the Totals by Fund report by Online, Not Online, or Both. If you want to post these separately into your GL, you will want to run the report twice: once for Not Online and next for Online. Of course, everything on the Totals by Description report is online receipts.

Most of our clients also reconcile their bank accounts monthly using the Reconcile Report from TouchPoint.

Here are the help articles for the TouchPoint reports mentioned above:

Adding information about the Failed Gift Task.