Lots of payments causing problems for bank reconciliation 2

[ramam1]

Hey there,
Accpac 5.6/SS 2008R2.
We receive and import a few thousand payments into AR on a monthly basis. Every day we receive a file from our payment processor (check and CC) and we import that file into AR creating the appropriate payment receipts in a single batch. At the end of the first week of the month we reconcile our bank statements against the end of the prior month.
The problem we're having is that not all the payments we imported during the month have cleared by the time we go to reconcile bank accounts. This is problematic because we cannot clear some entries in a payment batch and not others. Since some of the payments may have cleared by the end of the month and some not we need to be able to mark as cleared the entries that did clear but not the others. One of our accountants suggested that for each individual payment we receive we should create a separate batch so that we can clear them on an individual basis but that seems excessive to me - why create 1000 AR batches a month for payment receipts instead of one per day.
Am I overlooking something here? What is a smarter way to handle this?
thanks!

 

[ettienne]

1. Separate cash and check deposits from CC transactions by day.
2. Separate CC transactions by day into Amex and MC + Visa - that depends on your payment processor.

You need to investigate which entries do not clear and then figure it out from there. Typically cash and checks will clear the next business day, but CC transactions take longer.

 

[ramam1]

Thanks Ettienne.
Let's say we split the payment batches into daily batches for each of checks, Amex, and MC+Visa. What do we do about payments that we've been advised of (ie Check received by our payment processor) but have not yet cleared?

We want to give our customers the benefit of the doubt, since the check was received on time, that the payment will clear thus we must import and post the payment receipt but as the bank has not reported it as cleared we cannot mark it as cleared in Banking. Further it is regularly the case that some of the checks in a daily batch will have cleared while others will clear later (or even bounce later); this is problematic because we cannot clear only some entries in a payment batch but leave others untouched (as far as I know).

 

[DjangMan]

Option #2: Upgrade

Changes and New Features in Bank Services
Bank Services 6.0 Product Update 1 includes the following new features and improvements:

[ol 1]
[li]Enhanced G/L Integration to allow you to set the G/L Detail Reference, G/L Detail Description, and G/L Detail Comment for a Bank Entry Transaction Type. When the bank entry is posted, the reference fields in the corresponding G/L journal entry detail (corresponding to the Bank Account) are updated accordingly.[/li]

[li]When reconciling deposits, in addition to being able to clear whole deposits, you can now clear individual receipts within a deposit. This new functionality applies whether you reconcile manually or with an OFX statement.[/li]

[li]On the Deposit Details form, the Sort By feature has been changed to Sorted By, and is now display-only. To specify how transactions are sorted on the Deposit Details form, use Sort Deposit Details By on the Processing tab of the Bank Options form.[/li]

[li]On both the Deposit Register report and the Reconciliation Status report, you can now filter deposits with a status of Reconcile by Deposit Detail.[/li]
[/ol]

 

[ramam1]

That'll speed up our adoption of 6.0.
thanks folks