15. WOULDN’T IT BE NICE TO HAVE THE TERMINAL DO ALL THE WORK FOR YOU?

When closing down your business for the night, one of the least favorable tasks among business-owners is the reconciling of the day's business with the nightly deposits. Luckily, with breakthroughs in technology, this process is becoming easier than ever. At EMG, we welcome these new technologies and look for ways that they can benefit our merchants. This includes the daily settlement reports from your credit card processing terminal/software and the uploading of all your authorized transactions from a hard day's work. There are multiple ways to settle your authorized transactions at the end of the night. You can manually settle the transactions, automatically settle transactions at a pre-determined time of the day, or let the banking system settle the transactions for you. Which is the best method for you?

Whenever you successfully complete a sales transaction, you are granted an "authorization code." As each transaction is authorized, it is placed into a daily "batch." At the end of each day, it is necessary to "settle” your batch, which means you transmit the list of authorized transactions through the bankcard network which begins the fund transfer process between the cardholder's bank and our merchant bank. As mentioned previously, there are three ways to settle a batch; manually upload the transactions, automatically upload them at a set time, or allow the backend bank network to do it for you. No matter which way you settle, batching daily should prevent your transactions from downgrading to a mid- or non-qualified rate.

Manual settlement: (Best used in any situation needing to adjust transactions.) In this situation, you initiate batch settlement on the terminal. This should be done at the end of the business day to include all the day’s transactions. This method offers the ability to adjust transactions for merchants accepting tips or in a situation when a transactions needs to be voided. This method also ensures that detail and summary reports can be printed for the current batch.

Timed upload: (Best used in a Retail/Moto setting with any adjustments done before the close of business each night.) This type, often referred to as "auto-close," is pretty self-explanatory. As the name implies, all credit card transactions are settled automatically. Most merchants choose to run a detail report at the end of the day. This report ensures that you have all the information on the transactions that were processed that day, because after the settlement is run, the transactions are "erased" from the terminal. The only other thing required of you is to check your terminal for the "Settlement Report" the next morning to make sure your terminal successfully settled. Automatically settled transactions are batched once per day at a time programmed into your terminal, normally after business hours. When you check the terminal the next day, use the detail batch report to verify the results of the most recent settlement, to be sure that all transactions you expect to be settled are, in fact, settled.

Host-based settlement: (Best used for Retail/Moto businesses with no adjustments.) Host-based settlement is a lot like automatic settlement, except instead of your terminal being programmed to batch at a certain time, the backend bank network does an automatic batch every night around 5:00 AM Eastern Standard Time. When you check the terminal the next day, there will not be a "Settlement Report" printed for you. This report is printed when the first transaction of the day is run. This ensures that it is the next business day, and all the transactions that were captured the night before are ready to be released. With this option, you should also print a detail report each night to verify that all the transactions settled. If you would like to learn more about these processes, or to inquire if your equipment is compatible with a different settling procedure, please contact the customer service line at (800) 789-8897, option 2.