How to match up postings in Tessitura with postings (deposits?) from WorldPay?

Yes, we also had this issue until we realized that you can set your deposits with the credit card processor to post at a time that more closely matches your Tessitura workday.  This is the closest you will get to matching the Tessitura reports.  You will still have some differences that usually clear within a day or two, but they are easier to reconcile if your can change your deposit times to match Tessitura.  Our organization does business well past five or six pm which was when our day was initially set to close from the credit card companies, so we changed it so our end of day was midnight.  Now we have a lot less reconciling issues to deal with.  (Our web portal takes payments, a lot of which occur surprisingly close to midnight.)

Danette's tip about the provider batch time is a great one. It pairs really well with some advice we have in our batch management documentation, which says in part: 

In order to facilitate accurate reconciliation, the Tessitura Network recommends developing organization-wide practices to align all transaction dates, payment dates, batch dates, and posting dates. This allows the various Tessitura financial reports, which deliberately draw against different date sources depending on the report's intended use, to reflect results that match. It also allows Tessitura reports to reconcile against credit card payment provider reporting.

• The transaction date refers to the system-generated date and time that a user took an action, such as saving new contributions or orders, taking payments, and making adjustments or refunds. All transactions take place inside batches. The transaction date (along with the payment date, if applicable) is a key component of Tessitura’s audit trail, and is not editable.
• The batch date refers to the date the batch was opened. Reconciliation is easiest when all transactions in a batch have transaction dates that match the batch date. In practice, this means that users should only record transactions in batches with today's date. Do not use a batch from an earlier date to record new transactions.
• All postings are dated with a posting date, and the posting date is editable. Within a single posting, all batches should have the same batch date, and the posting date should be edited to match.
• Order dates and contribution dates are not commonly used in financial reconciliation. While they often reflect the original transaction date, they can be edited, such as when fulfilling rollover orders or when entering mailed or lockbox contributions. Additionally, a single order or contribution may contain many transactions over time. Financial reconciliation should be based on the transaction, payment, batch and posting dates as described above.

If you have these recommended pieces in place, and you still are having trouble reconciling with WorldPay, we'd love to help you further in a support ticket. Just email hello@tessituranetwork.com to get started. Also happy to hear if the community has more advice on this one. 

-Michael Flaherty-Wilcox 

Director of Practice Management, Tessitura Network

Robert,

The tips already provided by Danette and Michael are great. Another thing we do to help with reconciling credit card payments is that we build our General Ledger entries with separate lines by payment type. We combine Visa/Mastercard/Discover as one line since they are processed together by our credit card processor. American Express is on a second line, and checks and cash are combined on a third line. This allows for easy matching with our bank receipts since these different types of payments hit our account with different timing. American Express often takes a day or two longer than other credit cards, and our physical cash/check deposits aren't always immediate.

I hope this is helpful to you and your colleagues!

Yes!  I didn't think about this piece, but we do this also.  In fact, because it has changed over time dependent on the credit card processor, we separate out VISA/MC from Discover as separate lines, as well as AMEX, Cash/Checks, and ACH.  ACH because although it is essentially "cash", we might have it entered in Tessitura on the same day, but it hits the bank on a different day.  For the bank rec, it's much easier to add the G/L credit cards entries together to "match" what hits the bank, than it is to try and separate them if ever needed.

We wrote custom routines to import the World Pay settlement report into Tessitura, used some logic to match the WP settlement records with the data in T_PAYMENT_GATEWAY_ACTIVITY and wrote some reports to highlight exceptions.