If you use Xero and also let people pay you by credit/debit card through VostroPay, Sporty supports automatic bank reconciliation in Xero for the settlement amount that appears in your bank. This makes reconciliation one-click simple.
Note: This relates to receipting the daily settlement that appears in your bank after people have paid you via credit card or debit card. To turn this feature on, please contact support@sportsground.com. There is no extra fee for this service. Once enabled, any of your online forms that accept card payments will pick up the new settings automatically.
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The Problem It Solves
When people pay you via credit card or debit card, each transaction creates a paid invoice in Xero for you. However, the credit card processor (VostroPay) deposits one single bulk settlement payout into your bank the next day. This settlement payout is the total of all the previous day's transactions, minus the merchant fees.
It can be time consuming reconciling individual transactions in Xero against this bulk settlement amount. The auto-reconciliation feature for Xero solves this for you.
Note: daily settlement payouts from VostroPay will appear in your bank feed as 'Nuvei_MS' or 'TILL_Payments'.
How Auto-Reconciliation Works
When this feature is turned on, here's what happens.
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Payments go to a clearing account first. Each time someone pays you through an online form, the payment is automatically recorded in Xero against a temporary 'clearing' account instead of against your bank account.
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Sporty handles the daily settlement. Each day, Sporty receives a detailed file from VostroPay that lists every transaction and the exact fee charged on each one. Sporty then records the fees as an expense in Xero and creates a transfer from the clearing account to your bank account for the net daily settlement amount.
- Xero matches the transaction totals to the settlement payout. Xero will display the daily settlement payout that reached your bank alongside the transfer total, so you can reconcile it with one click.
Setting It Up
IMPORTANT: Contact Sporty at support@sportsground.com to request Xero auto-reconciliation for VostroPay settlements is enabled for your organisation. You will be unable to complete some of the steps below until this is complete.
Step 1: Create two new Accounts in Xero
In Xero, go to Accounting, then Chart of Accounts, then Add New Account. You will need two accounts:
1. A Current Asset account for the clearing account. For example, "VostroPay Clearing". This is where settlement payments will sit for a short while before they move to your bank account. See image below. Click Save.
2. An Expense account for the merchant fees. For example, 'Card Processing Fees'. This is where VostroPay's fees are recorded. See image below. Click Save.
Step 2: Enable in Sporty
1. Login to Sporty and click Admin Settings from your dashboard.
2. Go to Connections, then the Accounting tab.
3. Scroll to the section titled VostroPay Settlement Reconciliation.
4. Tick "Enable automatic VostroPay reconciliation" and click Save
5. Use the dropdowns to set the Clearing account and the Fee expense account that you created in Steps 1 & 2 above. Set the Bank account to be the actual bank account your daily VostroPay settlement is paid into. SAVE
What this does: This causes all invoices created by Sporty (where payment was processed through VostroPay) to automatically be coded in Xero to your VostroPay Clearing Account. Then, each day that VostroPay deposits a settlement payout into your bank account, Sporty will automatically transfer the value of the settlement payout from your VostroPay Clearing Account to the GL code for your actual bank account in Xero.
Xero will automatically match the daily settlement amount on your bank statement to the amount that Sporty transfers each day from your VostroPay Clearing Account to your bank ledger. This makes it visible for one-click-reconciliation in Xero.
NOTE: The daily settlement payout that gets deposited into your physical bank account relates to credit card transactions VostroPay processed in the 24 hours up until 6:00pm AEST the previous day. Therefore, to ensure the system posts a complete 24-hour day of payments/invoices to your VostroPay Clearing Account in Xero, the very first time you enable this auto-reconciliation feature it will only start posting these from 6:00pm AEST after this setup has been completed. This ensures the balance of the clearing account remains in sync with the daily settlement payouts being deposited by VostroPay into your bank.
So, please be patient - you won't see it working automatically in Xero until the day after the next 6:00pm AEST from whenever setup was completed. Similarly, if you subsequently disable the automatic VostroPay reconciliation, then the 24-hour window will reset and any payments recorded will therefore need to be manually reconciled.
VostroPay uses Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) which is generally 2 hours behind NZ time. However, this can vary due to daylight savings, so the settings in Sporty will automatically convert 6:00pm AEST to NZ time for you. Only payments processed after the stated time will be coded to your VostroPay Clearing Account for you. Any payments processed before the stated time will need to be reconciled manually.
6. Scroll to the bottom and click Save.
IMPORTANT: Once auto-reconciliation is enabled, any of your online registration forms in Sporty that are set to accept payment via credit cards will have "Automatically create invoices" turned on. This is necessary to ensure that every payment processed by VostroPay is visible to Xero.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my clearing account show payments as 'unreconciled'?
This is normal, and there is nothing to fix. In Xero, 'reconciling' means matching a line from your bank statement to a transaction. The clearing account is not a real bank account, so it has no bank feed or statement lines to match against. That is why its transactions show as unreconciled. The way to check the clearing account is healthy is you'll see that its balance reduces back towards zero each day after the fee expense and account transfer have been processed. Depending on the timing of the credit card payments you are processing, you may see the balance get all the way to zero, meaning that every transaction since the last settlement has been fully accounted for.
What if a transaction does not match?
If you notice a transaction does not match, compare the registration in Sporty with the VostroPay settlement payout report and the clearing account in Xero. If you are unable to identify the issue, please contact support@sportsground.com with the details.
What about refunds?
Refunds show up as negative amounts in the settlement and they will lower the total daily payout. It is technically possible that a day's refunds might exceed the value of credit card payments you receive. If so, the payout will be negative and will need to be managed manually.
What if something goes wrong and Sporty fails to process the transfer from our VostroPay Clearing Account in Xero?
The transfer performed by Sporty is triggered by Sporty receiving details of your settlement from VostroPay. Sporty has automated monitoring in place to alert our Support team if this fails to arrive. In the unlikely event you do not see the auto-reconciliation button appear in Xero, report this to support@sportsground.com so we can investigate for you.
Can I turn it off?
Yes, you can un-tick the reconciliation checkbox in your settings. From then on, invoices/payments will be coded directly to your bank account in Xero and you'll need to manually reconcile them from there.
Do I need to do anything each day?
Only your usual bank reconciliation in Xero, which is now a one-click task.
How can I see details of all the individual transactions relating to a single settlement payout from VostroPay?
Go into your Online Registrations tile from your Sporty dashboard and click the black Payment Report button from the top right of the screen and then select VostroPay Settlement Report. This shows all transactions within a payout.
When does it start?
Reconciliation starts accumulating from the next settlement cut-off time, which is 6:00pm AEST (normally 8pm NZT) after you save your settings above. You can see your start date and time on screen under 'Reconciliation starts from'. Your first automatic reconciliation will show up in Xero the day after that first full 24-hour window has passed, once VostroPay has settled the payout into your bank account.