You can reconcile tuition payments by matching daily time reports for the same time period from the three systems that touch the payment transactions.
For credit card payments, compare these reports using the same time period:
- Daily credit card total from the Student Information System cashiering session
- Batch summary report in the TouchNet Payment Gateway
- Corresponding bank deposit
For ACH payments, compare these reports using the same time period:
- Daily credit card total from the student system's cashiering session
- Daily ACH file from TouchNet Payment Gateway
- Corresponding bank deposit
Coordinating Report Ending Times
Even though the compared reports are all daily reports, they will generate different totals if they do not share the same cut-off time.
You probably already have an established close of business day time set for your student system's cashiering session. You should set up your credit card batch settlement and ACH file generation processes for that same time of day, adding a small delay to make sure all transactions process through the system.
For example, if your end of business day is 4:00 p.m., you could set your credit card batch and your ACH file generation to run at 4:02 p.m.
Summary Reconciliation
Most schools match the student system cashiering totals with the TouchNet Payment Gateway reports first. If the dollar amount and total number of transactions match, then they do not generally reconcile further. If the totals do not match, then they perform a detailed transaction reconciliation.
Transaction Reconciliation
If your summary totals do not match, the most likely cause is that transactions were processed slightly before or after the cut-off time.
In a transaction-based reconciliation, you match the individual transactions stored in the student system cashiering session with the credit card batch details report (for credit card payments) or the ACH file (for ACH payments).
You can always perform a brute force analysis, where you manually match up each transaction, usually in a spreadsheet. However, most schools find it faster to check the first transactions of the day and the last. Some may have been processed on the previous day, and others on the next business day. Locating those transactions should resolve most balance questions.