A Reporting Interface for your Merchants
Think about your own expectations: Whenever you log in to your account on a bank’s mobile app or website, you demand reporting. As a Payment Facilitator, your customers (who are merchants) require the same thing. I don’t know about you, but my bank statement is pretty easy to follow. A few transactions a month bringing money into the account, and a whole bunch of transactions where money is spent at various fast food restaurants and barbecue joints. Merchant reconciliation is more complicated because the way transactions impact the current available balance to the merchant differ.
- Sales occur at multiple times throughout the day, but merchant funds “settle” at a single time after hours.
- Refunds are taken immediately from a merchant’s available balance.
- Finally, while most transactions are initiated by a merchant who knows that they’ve occurred, some transactions, happen without a merchant’s knowledge. (Chargebacks, and ACH Rejects.)
How much slack will your merchants cut you?
The amount of leeway that your merchants give, in terms of up-to-the second accuracy, will kind of depend:
- If you send merchants to the ProPay website for their reporting, or use Single-Sign-On to embed our reports into your own interface, you don’t need to worry about any of this reporting business. It should be noted, by the way, that this is really the only option that works when you intend to provide your merchants with a branded ProPay debit card. Click here to learn about Single-Sign-On to a branded ProPay experience.
- If your merchants are set up on “sweeps” (Click here to learn about sweeps), then their expectations are going to be pretty low. Everything, and we mean everything, that impacts the available balance in a ProPay account when swept, is going to be included in a daily deposit report that we can send to you. Go ahead and take our big old data dump and frame it up pretty for your merchants.
- If, however, you intend to provide your merchants with an interface to move out money, or need to control the way this works, you are going to inherit the requirement to keep ALL transactions reconciled to the current available balance in each ProPay account.
Okay, I’ve chosen to make reports myself and I need to get serious about them
If you intend to support reporting on your own platform, (remember, Single-Sign-On or the Reporting API might give your users a better experience and is certainly going to be easier for you to build), and need to get every transaction’s details, then these are your sources of data: