Volume 1, Issue 4 Payment Processing News from Shift4 Corporation March 2005

TIP

What a few seconds of auditing can do for you!

Shift4's $ $ $ ON THE NET empowers its users to take control of their payment transactions by allowing a company wide audit to be conducted prior to deposit. Compared to traditional methods of transaction management, this proactive approach yields significant financial and operational benefits. However, merchants may be so accustomed to doing it “the old way” that they do not fully appreciate the value of the pre-settlement audit process.

Merchants employing the traditional reconciliation mode of transaction accounting typically put off batch balancing and verification until their monthly bank statements arrive. This practice tends to put merchants in a reactive, defensive position, requiring them to correct errors that were made weeks or even months earlier. If errors are discovered after settlement, merchants may pay discount rates for a transaction for which they will ultimately not receive funding. In addition, when merchants are forced to issue a credit they seldom get the discount rate back that they already paid. Timely adjustments made before settlement cost nothing. Erroneous transactions cause customer service issues and increase labor costs from retrieval requests.

Why let your monthly bank statement become an unwelcome surprise? $ $ $ ON THE NET's fully appointed Net Audit module allows merchants to correct errors before they become financial liabilities and/or customer service issues.

So what does the pre-settlement audit entail? It covers a lot of ground, but $ $ $ ON THE NET makes quick work of it. Compared to the time and aggravation of reconciling an error ridden bank statement, the audit process is quite a pleasant process that takes only a few minutes.

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Following are some of the functions carried out during a typical pre-settlement audit cycle:

  1. Report by profit center or company wide - Flags transactions with unresolved problems relating to qualification or communication issues; eliminates multiple postings and under-authorized transactions. This step alone has the power to save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month in penalty fees and charge back losses
  2. Balance your totals with those of your interfaced POS, PMS or web server systems.
  3. Add missing or inadvertently deleted transactions
  4. Edit inaccurate transactions
  5. Delete invalid transactions
  6. Reallocate or move transactions to another profit center (MID)
  7. Batch Authorize to ensure full authorization for every transaction
  8. Settlement Report produced upon final deposit that is your record of what was deposited to your accounts and the accounts of your customer

Once you've completed the necessary steps you can be assured of an accurate and compliant transaction batch. Automatic settlement may seem like it saves a lot of time, but auditing before you settle can save time and money.

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