BBMS and eTapestry (UK)

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When you signup for eTapestry you will have a 'Go Live' call with one of our eTap consultants. They go through the process with you of those critical initial steps to getting your foot in the door with your new system.

One of the processes you'll go through is the creation of your Blackbaud Merchant Services account. BBMS is a payment processor which allows you to take donations from your DIY Forms or through the manual processing of a transaction in a donation journal entry.

Before you dive into Blackbaud Merchant Services, you first need to create your Blackbaud Payment Service account. It's important to know the difference between the two:

  • Blackbaud Payment Services (BBPS) is Blackbaud's solution for secure credit card storage. All credit cards in your Blackbaud products are stored in our secure servers at BBPS. This protects the donor's personal information as well as the user from any liability. BBPS is required by all Blackbaud products to either process or store credit card information. BBPS is what enables Blackbaud software to adhere to the PCI-DSS security standards set forth by the major credit card companies. More information and signup process can be seen here
  • Blackbaud Merchant Services (BBMS) is a merchant account available to use with your Blackbaud products. Merchant accounts are responsible for actually processing the credit card transactions and depositing the funds into your bank account. More information and signup process can be seen here

When you signup for BBMS, you'll be given a unique username/password. This allows you to login to the BBMS Web Portal to view a list of transactions/disbursements. If you've ever clicked on 'Account Configurations' at the left hand side you'd notice a list of accounts in here. Usually, you'll see two accounts - one that has 'OFFLINE' and another that has 'ONLINE'. It's important that you don't delete these accounts as this will stop the processing of payments in your eTap system. To explain what they mean:

- OFFLINE is used for the processing of transactions in the donation journal entry in eTapestry

- ONLINE is used for the processing of transactions in a DIY Form in eTapestry

Unlike other systems, eTapestry can automatically process transactions based on a schedule such as every month. Each week, you'll get a disbursement report from Blackbaud Merchant Services. This is a list of transactions that have been processed. In order to account for them all, you'll need to reconcile between eTapestry and BBMS. For this, you can follow this guide which goes through the process.

If you're interested in reading more on Blackbaud Merchant Services, you can have a look at the following blogs:

Thanks for reading!

 
News Raiser's Edge® Blog 12/19/2014 6:00am EST

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