When processing donation payments, highly relevant information for accounting is scattered across multiple systems. 

• RaiseNow with the original donation record
• The CRM with a representation of that record according to its data model
• The acquirer in control of the execution of the summary payouts and the attribution of those payouts and corresponding fees to individual payments
• The bank as the sole point of truth when a payout actually has been achieved. 

This creates a highly challenging situations for accountants who need to clearly assign value date and net worth for each donation payment and balance those payments with payouts received in the organisations bank account. 

RaiseNow works with selected acquiring partners, banks, CRM systems and ERP systems to offer a fully automated end-to-end reconciliation service. This process is described in detail below. 

Let's set out what we want to achieve in accounting terms. If we receive two credit card donations  - say two donations at EUR 50 each, in the subledger we may want to see a booking statement like this for each donation:

Credit Card Donations 50 (cost center xyz) to Donation Revenue 50

A couple of days later the acquirer will execute a payout to the bank account for these two donations. But the acquirer will automatically subtract the fee. Let's assume the fee is 5% totalling CHF 5,- over the two payments. 

You may now want to see booking statements in your main ledger like this: 

Bank Account 95 to Credit Card Donations 95
Expenses 5 (cost center xyz) to Credit Card Donations 5

In order to automate this process RaiseNow executes the following steps in sequence

1. The subledger (usually the CRM) is notified about an initial donation and a representation of that donation is created according to the requirements of that system. 
2. When the acquirer provides payout information this is matched against entries in the camt file provided by the bank to identify the actual value date of the received payout. 
3. RaiseNow matches this information against records in our payment platform and update records accordingly. Records are updated with a value date as well as transaction fees as reported by the acquiring partner. 
4. Our integration layer updates information in the CRM, adding value date and acquirer fees. 
5. Within the CRM, the updated donation payments are compiled in a subledger for a summary booking statement and summary bookings are created periodically to be transferred to the main ledger. This step is outside the scope of RaiseNow services. 
6. RaiseNow creates the booking statements for the main ledger corresponding to the received payout. 

Use right click: Open image in seperate tab to enlarge.