ACH Step By Step - Part 4 - Reconcile

This "Step-by-Step" series is intended to provide you with an orderly progression of procedures and procedural considerations.

The actual details and expansive explanations are contained elsewhere in the Help pages and will be referred to by link to follow at the end of each page, where applicable.

This Step-by-Step page is dedicated to all aspects concerning advanced details of the Reconcile ACH Payments process.

When you have completed a full review of all the steps, you should be able to:

Reconcile ACH history

View results

View Application Log entries

Process the ACH Return file

Running Reconcile ACH History

The Reconcile ACH History function exchanges information between Collect! and Billing Tree that is new since the last reconciliation was run.

Running your RECONCILE ACH HISTORY process at once per day is extremely important for three reasons:

It surveys your system to see if there are currently any ACH payments due but not yet reported to Billing Tree. If there are, these will be uploaded and processed.

It downloads any reversals of payments that Billing Tree has received since the last time your office has done a reconciliation, and writes a Process Summary Report with a date/time stamp, making each occurrence of the report unique in your folder. The menu path to locate these reports is "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH".

See Reconcile ACH History, topic Processing Summary.

Reconcile ACH History Results

It downloads any external payments (made by debtors at the ACH Gateway directly and not through your office) that it has received and which are not posted yet on your system. If there are any transactions which cannot be matched to a Collect! file number, it writes an exception report and stores it in the path "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\UnmatchedExternals". The file name "UnmatchedExternals" will include a date/time stamp associated with the download so that each exception report has a unique file name.

See Reconcile ACH History, topic Unmatched Externals

If you are running an older version of Collect!, you may see the "UnmatchedExternals" report entitled "UnmatchedReturns".

Reconcile ACH History

The process also writes a detailed log into the path "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\achnow.txt".

The menu path to access the Reconcile batch process is " Daily Administration\ Payments and Charges\Reconcile ACH History". See the Help page called Reconcile ACH History for more detailed information.

Users of CV11.6.2.7 and higher who are also licensed for the Scheduler Module now have an enhanced automation with the addition of the Reconcile process being added to the Scheduler Task list of options. You may run this process offline and unattended. Contact us at sales@collect.org for module pricing.

Viewing Results

The module does the following tasks as triggered by data or events related to the reconcile ACH history process:

ACH payments whose payment due dates have come due now are submitted to Billing Tree.

To recap the initiating event, when you first create a recurring ACH payment schedule, the module creates a transaction for each payment.

ACH Payment Transactions

The Transaction Detail for these transactions looks like this:

Recurring ACH Payment

The User 2 field of the Transaction Detail Tab is populated with a unique Reference # that is downloaded from Billing Tree.

Reference # in User 2

The Confirmation # field in the lower right corner of the of the Transaction Detail Tab is populated with Billing Tree's unique Transaction ID.

Transaction ID in Confirmation #

If the ACH payment schedule includes a convenience fee, this transaction will appear posted on the account once a recurring payment is processed successfully.

Convenience Fee Transaction

If any previous payments come back as NSF, the system is triggered to reverses the payment and any convenience fee charged according to your ACH Setup preferences. Also, depending on your Transaction Type settings, if you have an NSF Contact Plan in place on Transaction Type 105, the actions in that contact plan will be executed on any ACH reversals as well when you next run your "Process automatic contacts previously scheduled" in your Daily Batch Processing, if that includes charging an NSF to the debtor as well, then you will see the application of that charge after you have run your " Process automatic contacts previously scheduled" anytime subsequent to the Reconcile ACH History process.

ACH Payments Setup

If you have the "NSF cancels recurring payments" switch enabled in your ACH Setup, then receipt of an NSF through the Reconcile ACH History process will trigger an automatic stop of the schedule by deleting out all the details of the recurring payments including deleting EFT Notices.

If any payments have been posted at the Billing Tree rather than through Collect!, they are also processed when you reconcile. If they cannot be matched to debtors in your database, a file is stored with all relevant information so that you can process the payments as required. It is stored in the "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\UnmatchedExternals-150519-163821.csv", where the numeric part of the file name are the date (May 19, 2015) and the time was HH:MM:SS being 16:38:21 when the exception report was created.

A processing summary PDF is stored for each reconcile that you run. It is also stored in the "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\ProcessingSummary-150519-164459.pdf" folder, where the date is May 19, 2015 at 16:44:69 time stamp when the file was downloaded.

It also writes a detailed log into the path "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\achnow.txt".

Viewing Application Log Entries

If the Reconcile ACH History results reported any errors, these can be examined in the Application Log, accessed in the menu path "System\ Diagnostics\Application Log".

Application Log Entry for Billing Tree ACH Error

Switch ON " Misc" and "Error" in the Collect! Log Viewer settings to quickly filter the Application Log for Billing Tree Module entries.

Additionally, the process also writes a detailed log into the path "CV11\bin\BillingTree\ACH\achnow.txt".