Reconciling your Spektrix payment reports with the amounts coming into your bank account is an important part of your financial auditing process, and logging into your payment provider's online systems will allow you to match Spektrix's daily takings with the daily card transactions. Check our article about this process before continuing here.
If the two figures do not immediately appear to balance, there are a couple of likely reasons.
The batch may have been closed some minutes after midnight
This would mean that any transactions immediately after midnight would be attributed to the following day in Spektrix, but included in the first day's batch history. These types of discrepancy should balance over two days, as the first day will be down, but the second day up by the same amount.
For example: a customer books online late on Monday night, at 00:02 am, spending £50.
- If the payment provider closes their batch at 00:05 am, then they will batch the order with Monday's transactions
- Spektrix, however, will say that he booked on Tuesday morning
- Therefore Monday's report will appear to be £50 down, and Tuesday's £50 up
One or more payments may not have settled yet
All payments should be listed as settled as soon as the batch is closed, but it is not uncommon for a few payments to take longer for YesPay/SagePay to process. Running the report again in a few days time should give them all time to settle.
You are likely to find this if you reconcile your payments within the first 24 hours. If the settled amount does not match your Spektrix report, try including unsettled transactions, or searching by both types. You should be able to drill down to the individual payments and see which, if any, are marked as unsettled (pending). Log in again the following day and in most cases they will have settled overnight.
If the payment ultimately rejects, you will need to contact the customer, though this happens very rarely.
Erroneous charges have been made
It may happen that your staff may manually authorise a payment in Spektrix which got 'stuck' which they should not have, or cancelled a payment which went through. Spektrix sometimes has to 'hold' an order if YESpay or Sagepay have had a problem processing the payment. Spektrix holds this order as it waits for you to authorise or cancel the payment.
To check if the payment has gone through or not, you should log in to your YesPay/Sagepay account.
- If the Box Office reply Confirm to this message, when the card payment actually declined, then the order will be confirmed but the customer will not be charged. Your banking will be down and the customer gets away without paying.
- If the Box Office reply Delete to this message, when the card payment was authorised, then the customer will be charged but will not have any confirmed items. Your banking will be up as you will have received payment but not sold the customer any items.