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Reconciling Payments with Merchant Accounts

Zuora

Reconciling Payments with Merchant Accounts

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Payment reconciliation is the process of checking your bank statements against your accounting and Zuora records to ensure the payment amounts match. You can sort successful payments by day and credit card type, which makes it easier to reconcile your payment gateway. Zuora recommends that you find the report name for payments in each gateway and refer to that name. Focus reconciliation on credit card type per day.

Bank Identification Number (BIN) on Payment Methods

For all credit cards and debit cards created in the system, we will track and store the Bank Identification Number (BIN) associated with those payment methods, and attach them to any payments processed against those credit and debit cards. This number (also known as the Issuer Identification Number) is the first six or eight digits of the credit card number, which is useful for reconciliation and behavior tracking among different payment method types (e.g. to differentiate between Visa cards issued by Chase vs. Citibank, etc.), and will be available in the retrieving payment method API operations and the Payment Method data source export. In addition, the payment export will now show the BIN of the payment method associated with each payment (if applicable).

Best Practices for Payment Reconciliation

  • Reconcile on a frequent interval. It’s easier to reconcile payments from today or this week, rather than payments from the past month or few months.
  • Group payments together to sum up the totals to see if they match (for example, by payment method).
  • If you find that totals are not matching, you may need to review and reconcile every single transaction to understand why the totals do not match.
  • Use payments reports for reconciliation. You can use the following fields in Zuora's reports to help you with payment reconciliation:
    • Payment Date
    • Transaction ID
    • Bank Identification Number

Considerations

Take into account the following when payments are reconciled:

  • Look for date discrepancies. The payment date in Zuora is when the payment transaction was processed; it is not the settlement date.
  • Certain payments (such as direct debit payments) take longer to settle and may not have cleared (funds transferred to your bank account) by the time you reconcile payments with your bank account.
  • There may be differences in the original payment amount and the cleared payment amount for reasons that include fees charged by the bank for processing, currency conversion rate fluctuations, and errors in your records or in the banks’ records.