22. RECONCILIATION HELP

At Eliot Management Group (EMG), we receive hundreds of phone calls each month after merchants receive their monthly merchant statement. These phone calls are filled with questions regarding individual transactions, batches, and deposits. In order to alleviate these inquiries, EMG would like to provide our merchants with some tips on how to eliminate the differences between what the merchant thought would be deposited to their bank account and what was actually deposited.

What is Reconciliation?

Reconciliation is the process of balancing the transactions you've run that show on your monthly merchant statement against your bank's records. You will want to make sure your merchant statement balance matches your online banking balance to ensure that your account information is up to date.

Why Reconcile?

Many businesses get by without reconciling their merchant statement balances with their bank account balances. However, this can lead to confusing deposit differences and questions about how much money is actually in your bank account at a given time.

Ultimately, the decision to reconcile is yours, based on your business needs. If you've been able to make do despite discrepancies, reconciliation may not be necessary for your business. That said, if reconciliation can help you make more efficient use of your cash flow, it may be worth taking the time to reconcile your merchant account and keep it balanced. If you're thinking reconciliation sounds like something that would be good for your business but hard to accomplish, now is a good time to give reconciliation another look.

Daily Discount Billing

If you are on daily discount billing, your fees are taken out on a daily basis. For example, if you ran a $100.00 transaction, and you only saw $98.00 on your bank statement, the fees are taken out daily. This is nice for smaller businesses that do not always have a bulk sum of money at the end of the month for monthly discount fees.

Monthly Discount Billing

If you are on monthly discount billing, your fees are taken out on a monthly basis. For example, if you ran a $100.00 transaction, you will see a $100.00 transaction on your bank statement. At the end of the month, you will see the $2.00 fee deducted. This is nice for larger businesses who will have a lump sum of money at the end of the month, and who have processed many transactions.

At the beginning of the month (and throughout the month, depending on your account set-up), you will be billed for any fees due for the previous month’s processing. While Eliot Management Group tries to make it very straightforward to record deposits that correspond to individual customer payments, it can be difficult to match these individual transactions to the batched deposit totals that appear on your bank account statement. In order to ease the confusion, we have sample statements available online by clicking here. If you are still confused about a fee or charge on your monthly merchant statement or bank account, or you have reconciliation questions, please contact our 24-hour customer service line at (800) 789-8897 option 2.