Tessitura & Element Reconciliation Reporting

We are new to Tessitura & have been using Element as our gateway & CC processor. We have been having a very difficult time reconciling the credit cards on the GL Summary Report from Tess to the monthly statement from Element. Does anyone have a reliable & accurate way to make these match? 

We are aware of the  time zone issue, but the EPS Tool has not been accurate for us either. We are also trying to be more proactive about posting batches daily (we were doing it once a week before, since we do our main reporting for our Board by month) but not sure how helpful that will be.

Any advice, reports, or experience is welcome!  



[edited by: Carri Gergely at 2:23 PM (GMT -6) on 5 Sep 2014]
  • We reconcile on a daily basis.  We have a spreadsheet that lists each Tessitura credit card posting.  2 or 3 times a week I log onto Element and pick up their batch info.  Some variances are just timing differences, but others can indicate problems with transactions being held up, or duplicated, that I want to deal with right away.

     

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    From: Tessitura Finance Forum [mailto:forums-finance@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Carri Gergely
    Sent: Friday, September 05, 2014 2:24 PM
    To: Leslie Fillingham
    Subject: [Tessitura Finance Forum] Tessitura & Element Reconciliation Reporting

     

    We are new to Tessitura & have been using Element as our gateway & CC processor. We have been having a very difficult time reconciling the crefit cards on the GL Summary Report from Tess to the monthly statement from Element. Does anyone have a reliable & accurate way to make these match? 

    We are aware of the  time zone issue, but the EPS Tool has not been accurate for us either. We are also trying to be more proactive about posting batches daily (we were doing it once a week before, since we do our main reporting for our Board by month) but not sure how helpful that will be.

    Any advice, reports, or experience is welcome!  




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  • Our finance person was having similar troubles, and it took us a while to figure out what we do now—and at least I think there’s no more confusion. We’re not reconciling with element’s statement; rather, with daily deposits into our bank account, but some of this may still apply.

    - Know that you can backdate batch postings. We never have a single batch with transactions that span two different days, so even if I have unposted batches for an entire week, I can backdate-post each day’s batches into a single posting timestamped with the date of those transactions.
    - We have two different merchant accounts which deposit to our bank account separately, so to sum up these deposits in the postings, our payment methods for a single merchant account are all assigned the same GL. So on the posting summary report, it comes out as one GL for e-commerce per day, and one GL for MOTO/Retail per day.

    Hope that helps!

    -Nick

    On Sep 5, 2014, at 3:20 PM, Carri Gergely <bounce-carrigergely1625@tessituranetwork.com> wrote:

    We are new to Tessitura & have been using Element as our gateway & CC processor. We have been having a very difficult time reconciling the crefit cards on the GL Summary Report from Tess to the monthly statement from Element. Does anyone have a reliable & accurate way to make these match? 

    We are aware of the  time zone issue, but the EPS Tool has not been accurate for us either. We are also trying to be more proactive about posting batches daily (we were doing it once a week before, since we do our main reporting for our Board by month) but not sure how helpful that will be.

    Any advice, reports, or experience is welcome!  




    This message was sent automatically to you by www.tessituranetwork.com because you subscribed to the Tessitura Finance Forum. You may reply to this message to post to the Finance forum or visit the site to search, read and post to the forums. In the interest of keeping the forum posts from becoming cluttered, we encourage you to delete previous message text from your reply before sending. Thank you!

  • In case you're not aware of it, Tessitura does have an optional utility component available to download Element transaction data (no sensitive card data, of course) to a local SQL Server table for easier reporting and reconciliation.  It's located in the Version Upgrades and Patches workspace on TASK, in solution #32. 

    It should be noted that this utility is offered as beta software only.  We have not committed to supporting or enhancing the utility, but it has proved useful for several sites.  

  • Are you talking about a tool other than the EPS Tool? That has not been working for us...

  • We use a selection of our own reports along with the Element reports that are available from Tessitura under shared reports.  We have recently found a bug in the Element reports.  With the advent of Tess v12.5.1 came a refund button.  We think that when that button is used the transaction type in Element is CreditCardRefund not CreditCardCredit.  The element reports provided through shared reporting only see CreditCardCredit as a refund and thus are overstating income and understating refunds.  For example this section of the report code 

    SettledAmount = case when TransactionStatusCode <> 15 then 0 when TransactionType = 'CreditCardCredit' then TransactionAmount * -1 else TransactionAmount end 

    needs to be changed to something like

    SettledAmount = case when TransactionStatusCode <> 15 then 0 when TransactionType = 'CreditCardCredit' then TransactionAmount * -1 when TransactionType = 'CreditCardReturn' then TransactionAmount * -1 else TransactionAmount end 

    We are in the process of building a report that will reconcile Element against Tessitura on a payment level.  The payment number in Tess = the reference number in Element.  For us a payment can go to several different GLs -fee GLs, ticket GLs, etc.  The reports we built for our GL import make reconciliation hard work when Element  and Tessitura are off.   If you are interested in what we develop to assist reconciliation, please let me know.    You'll need the EPS shared reports installed for our solution to be of any assistance

  • I am definitely interested in hearing more about this report you're building... We have the EPS tool, and have been reconciling Tess to Element/Vantiv through that and by searching transactions by date & time (since we're not mountain time) directly in Vantiv, which is kind of a pain.  My email is carrie@groundlings.com!