Retail/restaurant
Cash and card payments generate large amounts of data that are very difficult to control in a manual process. Adra Match Accounts data matching solution simplifies your work and gives you control and visibility in ways you never thought possible.
With Adra Match Accounts, you get:
- Automatic matching of transactions
- Automatic control of the funds received at the bank per cost centre
- A reconciliation process without individual personalisation
- Completed reports for the monthly account
- Control of IP, OP and differences for each month
Three main flow areas
A retail chain’s flow can be divided into three main areas in which the reconciliation of accounts is particularly intense.
- Cash
- Card terminals for debit cards such as Visa, Mastercard and Eurocard
- Credit cards with external redeemers, such as American Express and Diners Club
Cash
Cash often gives rise to very time-consuming reconciliation work, because there are so many transactions. Many items from multiple cost centres hit your bank statement every day. The daily takings system reports to the finance system every day, but in many cases it can take 2-14 days before the money is actually deposited in the bank. This makes it particularly difficult to keep track of which cost centres, and which day’s sales money, has been received for.
To facilitate the reconciliation process and transaction handling, businesses open one bank account per cost centre. Multiple accounts in a chart of accounts complicate administrative work, making it time-consuming and costly. Reconciliation is still just as extensive, but now spreads over several bank accounts. More than one person is often involved in reconciliation and everyone has their own method!
Card terminals
Card terminals cause time-consuming reconciliation work with many entries from multiple cost centres, hitting your bank statement every day in just the same way as daily takings payments. The cards that are used can be divided into two categories. Debit cards such as Visa, Mastercard and Eurocard, and credit cards with external redeemers such as American Express and Diners Club.
Reconciliation of debit cards
The sales made via debit cards show up on a bank account a day or two after the sales location has closed business for the day. The sum comes in as a gross amount and the redeemer’s charges are billed retrospectively. This makes reconciliation easy, but the high number of transactions complicates matters.
Reconciliation of credit cards with external redeemer
Payments made by credit card show up on your statement as a single lump sum for all purchases logged. The fee has already been deducted. You cannot see what you have paid for on the statement. Therefore, payments almost always end up in the settlement account for accounting purposes. Settlement accounts are charged manually each day, based on information from the central bank either via bgmax file or paper statements. Credit card payments are often not such a large element of sales, but the manual bookkeeping work is very demanding.
It is not unusual to try to resolve reconciliation problems by booking in bank account statements in the accounts (debit a debtor account and credit the bank, often a 16XX account). In this way, the bank is always reconciled and the difference is on a debtor account instead. This is an administratively time-consuming solution involving both duplication and additional accounts in the chart of accounts. You still do not know which sales days you have been paid for.