CBSubs and invoice checking

Hello

For our books we need to have informations on our invoices about the payments made, in order to be able to easily retrieve trace of payments.

Is it possible to have automatically on the invoice a mention Paid at such date and by mean of :
- the autorisation id if the payment has been made by a credit card
- an ID transaction if the payment has been manually recorded from the back end

Also can I send automatically these two informations by a get function to a book keeping software such as zoho books ?

Thanks
Jean

The invoice is customized at CBSubs > Settings > Display > Invoices. What CBSubs information is available through substitutions can be found in "Substitutions in all fields of invoice" close to the bottom of the page. Any further information would likely need to be obtained using CB Query Field then substituted in, but that may be an issue for anything other than 1 off emails since you'd likely need to just grab the most recent basket.

Also can I send automatically these two informations by a get function to a book keeping software such as zoho books ?

CBSubs URL lets you make HTTP GET/POST requests on subscription state changes. You could send information using that.

Most of banks send data with autorisation id and not transaction id for Credit Card, which means that it is impossible to relate payment and invoice other than manually

Could you implement Credit Card autorisation id as an available field for substitution if there is one ?

Most gateways do not send back the Credit Card authorization number through their gateway API, which gateway specifically are you using? PayPal for example does not send this information. In most cases this would result in the substitution returning nothing, which could cause a lot of confusion as to why it's returning nothing. They all however return the Transaction ID, which we do allow you to substitute.

I understand but the problem is that most banks do not send the Transaction id in their books but their own transaction reference and often the card authorization id. HSBC behaves this way.

So there is no way to correlate invoices and payment receives. We use Ingenico Ogone and manuel gateways.

At least we would need to be able to edit a list with invoices, numbers, transaction ids and credit card autorisation from the back end

activha wrote: I understand but the problem is that most banks do not send the Transaction id in their books but their own transaction reference and often the card authorization id. HSBC behaves this way.

So there is no way to correlate invoices and payment receives. We use Ingenico Ogone and manuel gateways.

At least we would need to be able to edit a list with invoices, numbers, transaction ids and credit card autorisation from the back end

I understand your issue and pain pretty well, since I'm handling a similar task for Joomlapolis own sales. Often banks don't even give a file but just a paper with the authorization numbers (or charge a hefty premium to get the detailed information as files), and there are 2 ways of reconciliating the books:

Note: This is not a technical support nor accounting advice, just trying to help you find your way to reconciliate the 3 accounting informations (sales, credit-cards bank statements, bank account statements):

1. Record by record: That requires having a table with authorization and transaction ids, that is usually available only offline. You would need to ask your bank and/or Ingenico to get the authorization number in your notifications (not sure that is possible today. It wasn't a couple of years back). CBSubs will record the raw notifications so then you would need to extract the sales notifications and apply on a sale-by-sale basis and apply method 2 below for each sale.

2. On a monthly total basis (method of external cash register accounts). If your 2 totals are same, two intermediate "receivables" and "payables" balancing account balancing are the formal proof that all sales have been paid. Our accounting does it this way (simplified explanation, due to VAT it is a bit more complex): One account number for sales (actually 2 per currency and payment method: One for export and one for domestic with VAT, in EU your mileage may vary), goes into payables account. From payables, the bank's monthly statements "move" the accounted money into bank-receivables account. Then the amounts received from bank into your bank account move the amount from your receivables account into the bank accounting account. That way you can check that nobody lost money on the way. And have a legal proof that all sales and payments have been accounted on a monthly basis.

Note that lots of restaurants apply a method "3": Account sales with cash-register auxiliary accounting, account monthly or quarterly sales. Account for amounts received from bank, and account difference as banking fees.... Of course less precise and no verification of money lost on the way, but simplest method....

Exact reconciliation is a painful manual task, and as long as you don't get automatically fully electronic files from your bank and PSP, it will stay manual.

That's one of the reasons of Paypal's success, as they provide detailed CSV files for any period of time, and you don't need authorization reconciliation, as Paypal does it for you. But their files are very detailed and treating them requires a bit of scripting to get useful numbers our.

Anyway, I do the above with our accountant regularly and really hope that in the future things become simpler.

Before using method 2 or 3, you would need to check with your accountant if you could use an "external auxiliary accounting book, cash-register-like" to record the monthly sales, transactions and payments all at once instead of one by one into your accounting...

Hope the above is understandable and helpful.