Introduction
The Bank Reconciliation Report is designed to closely match your bank statement. In order to do this, it needs to ensure the payment dates match the banking dates. For electronic payments, this is likely to match where the payment is made prior to the cutoff time as advised by your merchant. For manual payments such as cash and cheques, this depends entirely when the banking of the cash and cheques is deposited.
The cutoff time as advised by your credit card merchant can be set in iBex so that payments received after the cutoff time will appear on the date following the date it was recorded. For example if the cutoff time is 21:00 and the payment was received at 21:30 then that payment will show in the next date of the report - not the current date.
To set the payment cutoff time, follow these steps:
1. Select the Account Details screen from the Account menu group
2. Scroll down to “Payment Default Cutoff Time”. See screen shot:
3. Enter the cutoff time and click Save. Note entering 00:00 will disable this feature.
The deposit of manual payments (cash and cheque) is not constant and may be the same day, next day or next business day (allowing for weekends and public holidays). To cater for this, a deposit slip management system has been included. This allows bank deposit reference numbers to be entered in advance into iBex. It also allows the tagging of which payment types require a manual deposit using a deposit slip eg cash & cheque.
When a manual payment is recorded, the active deposit slip reference will be automatically added to the payment record and will continue to do so until the deposit slip is closed by the entry of a banking date. Then all ongoing manual payments will be tagged to the next active deposit slip.
For large operators with multiple payment offices, a multi office environment can be registered. This will enable deposit slips to be managed at the office level rather than for the account overall. That is, each payment office will have its own range of deposit slip references.
Single Office Operation
The following description is for single office operators.
To setup deposit slips, follow these steps:
1. Select the Account Details screen from the Account menu group.
2. Scroll down to “Maintain Bank Deposit Details”. See screen shot:
This will initially show a blank screen as follows:
3. Enter all forward deposit slips as per example below by entering one at a time and clicking the Save button:
To determine which payment types that are associated with deposit slips, follow these steps:
1. Select Maintain Payment Methods in the Account Details Screen. This will launch the following popup:
2. Tick the payment methods that require a deposit slip. In the example above we have selected cash and cheque only.
3. Click Save.
With the payment cutoff and deposit slips set, the payment screen is used to record payments as follows:
For a new payment, enter the payment type as Cash and the screen will add a deposit field as shown:
This deposit field is pre-populated with the currently active deposit slip reference i.e. the next in the series of pre entered deposit slip numbers that does not have a banked date recorded on it.
The deposit slip ref can either be removed or changed at this point. If changed, the value entered is not validated against the predefined list. The list is only used as a prompt.
If viewing an existing payment and the deposit slip field is blank, then it can be subsequently added but it will not prompted with the currently active deposit slip number.
To run this report, click on the Payment Reconciliation report in the Finance menu group. This will launch the Payment Reconciliation Report screen as per the following example:
The report will default to the current date and the default date type is payment received date. This is the date that the payment was recorded in iBex. The other date type is payment banked date. This is the date that payment is banked. If the Payment Banked Date type is selected, the screen will change as per the example below:
Note that a new field called Payment Cutoff Time is displayed. If not preset with a time, it will show 00:00 which disables it i.e. date banked is the same as date received for electronic payments. However if it displays a time, then any electronic payment received after that time, will appear on the following date if the report is set to Payment Banked Date. Again this is to ensure that the payments match the bank statement because payments received after the cutoff date will appear on the following date on the bank statement.
For example note the credit card payment for $85 as highlighted in red. It appears in both the Payment Received and Payment Banked selections in the examples above because the payment cutoff time is disabled. If the payment cutoff is set to 21:00 and this payment was received at 21:30 then it will appear on the following date bank statement. In order to see the same on this report, the Payment Cutoff Time must be set to 21:00. The example below now shows this credit card appearing on April 22 which should match the bank’s statement.
Had this payment been received before cutoff time, it would not appear on April 22 but April 21 with the Payment Banked Date option set.Note that the payment cutoff time can be preset to display the correct time on opening this report if it is set in the Account Details Screen as per the screen shot below:
As with electronic payments, manual payments such as cash and cheque need to have a mechanism for aligning the with the bank statements. As explained above, this is done by assigning manual payments to a desposit slip reference. When the manual payments are banked, the banking date is entered against the deposit slip and this can be done by clicking on the Deposit Slip link in this screen. This will open the Deposit Slip screen as shown:
We can see from this that any payments recorded under ref 123451 has been banked on April 22 and should appear on the report if the date banked option is selected and it is displaying for April 22. All new manual payments should be recorded under the next active deposit slip number which is 123452.
In this example, we have a payment entered into iBex on April 21 with deposit reference 123451. But this deposit (along with any others with the same reference) was banked on April 22. So we will see this payment record on April 21 for date type selected to Payment Received Date and on April 22 if date type is selected to Payment Banked Date. See the respective screen shots below where the payment record is highlighted in red.
And...
This will display for multi property accounts only and if selected, will limit payments to those received for bookings made on the selected property only. Note that selecting a property will exclude payments made on invoices, as invoices can have multiple bookings and therefore multiple properties. However if the payment is referencing both a booking and an invoice then it will be included.
Multi Office Operation
The following description is for multi payment office operators where each payment office has its own deposit slip number range but the payments are being made into the same account.
Open the Account Details screen from the Account group in the Settings menu.In this screen, scroll down to the field lablled Maintain Pay Office Details and click the link.
This will open the following screen:
The Maintain Bank Deposit Slip is active in this screen even if an office is not defined. In such a case the deposit slip will be for the overall account.
To enter a new office, click the New button
Proceed to enter all payment offices one at time as per the example below.
Each user that has a login access can optionally be assigned to a payment office. To do this, select the user details and select the office they are associated with. See example.
Once users have been mapped, the Manage Office screen will list the assigned users as follows:
With payment offices registered, deposit slips can now be maintained at the payment office level rather than the account level. To do this, select an office and then click on the Maintain Bank Deposit Slips link and the following screen will show:
Note that deposit slips can still be entered for the overall account by ensuring that N
With payment offices registered, the payment screen now changes to show the office:
If the logged in user has been assigned to a payment office, then that office will be automatically entered into the payment office field. Otherwise the payment office must be manually selected or left blank. If a manual payment is being received (cash or cheque) then the currently active deposit slip reference for the selected office will display. If no office selected then the currently active deposit slip reference for the overall account will display.
The payment reconciliation report will now have Payment Office added as a new filter and if selected, the payments listed will only be those made via the selected payment office.
