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Reconciling from BBMS (how to manage transaction fees)

Megan Girvalo

We went live with BBMS a few months ago and we are looking for ways to improve on how we reconcile gross vs net amounts due to transaction fees. I know we can see transaction fees on our disbursement reports but we spend loads of time going through the report line by line to reconcile - surely there is an easier way?!?

Does anyone have a process that is working for them that they would be willing to share? Are you recording fees in RE? Does that help? How do you import as I can't find a unique reference field to match on?

Any insight would be appreciated!

Best,

Megan

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Comments

Austen Brown

Hi Megan Girvalo‍ - Fees should not be your concern for RE, as this is information that Finance needs to track in its system; any donation listed in RE should be listed for the full transaction amount.

Below are the steps I follow when reconciling a disbursement from BBMS (we receive four disbursements a month):

Gather all Batches that contain transactions that are processed through BBMS (OLX, LO, MobilePay, RE EFT processing, etc.) for the cycle in question
Total the Batches together - write down this total, you will need it later.
Go to BBMS > Reports > Disbursement > Detailed Report, for the cycle you are reconciling
Scroll to the bottom of the Detailed Report and note the gross total listed at the bottom.
Does your total match the disbursement gross total? Yes, you're good to go! (Skip the next step)
If there is a discrepancy, compare the report to your system and figure/fix the difference; more than often than not I have overlooked a batch that needs to be included in the count.
Once you can match the gross disbursement total for the distribution cycle you are good to go!

Let me know if you have any questions.

Sarah White

Hi Megan (and anyone else that might have insight into this!) -- I know this topic is old, but I'm interested to see if anyone does have a process that's working for them that enables them (or their finance dept) to quickly reconcile gross vs net transactions when using BBMS. It's not a problem on the RE side, but our finance department would love to find an quicker way to reconcile net transactions received vs the gross amount that we record in RE.

Thanks in advance for any guidance you may have!

Austen Brown

Hi Sarah - We utilize the steps listed below to reconcile the gross amount for the RE side. We then post all the gifts apart of the distribution cycle to FE/GL in one go. This makes it easy for Finance to use the distribution report to see the gross and net portions of the distribution, to then account for fees within their system.

Sarah White

Thanks Austen, that's very helpful!

Madeleine Holdsworth

We record the gross amount of the gift in RE. Our finance dept deals with the fees and the reconciliation of same. They pull the disbursement reports from BBMS themselves.

Madeleine Holdsworth

This is so helpful! My finance department has such trouble reconciling the BBMS disbursement reports to our posted gifts. They literally ask me to match up every gift for them….I am going to try this and see if it helps what is becoming a painful monthly process. Thank you.

Austen Brown

@Madeleine Holdsworth - If you have FE and post batches to the GL, I recommend you post these batches together in one post. At my last org, this helped our Finance team significantly and helped reduce the amount of work that was expected of me.

Beth Gibney

@Madeleine Holdsworth at my org, I am the database admin and financial analyst. Every month, I reconcile to the bank by pulling a cash and paycash report and comparing that to what hit the bank. I first ensure that all blackbaud batches that hit that month were posted. when I send the deposit summary that ties to the bank to our finance department, at the bottom of the sheet is where i record the total amount of blackbaud fees for that month. I manually tally up the fees listed on each batch. I'd be happy to help answer any questions if you need additional help. Beth.Gibney@atlanticare.org.

Madeleine Holdsworth

Thank you. I definitely try that.