Viewing and sharing Payment Reconciliation Reports

Arbor's Payment Reconciliation reports allow you to gather even more information on the payments coming into and leaving your account for reconciliation purposes.

Payout Overview

This high-level report can be found in School > Payments > Reconciliation > Card Payments > Payout Overview. With this report, you can check the status of your payouts as seen in the Payout Status field in the table. 

You can also click into the payout and view additional details about the payout including all card transactions, refunds, and failed refund transactions.

Settlement Summary

The Settlement Summary report allows users to break down the total payout amount into different payout dates, bank accounts, and groupings. You can find the Settlement Summary in School > Payments > Reconciliation > Card Payments > Settlement Summary.

You can change the filters at the top of the page to select the latest payout to see the latest payout that was made to your bank account, and which bank account to display search results for.

You can also filter the results into our new groupings, letting you see the total amount paid by these groups.

• Description will show the text in the description field of your customer account types. For example, you may add a description for a specific School Shop product e.g. calculators and see how much the calculators sold in the shop add up to. You can also separate between Student Meals and Staff Meals by adding the relevant descriptions to these.
• Accounting Code allows you to see all payouts from a set accounting code, for example, if you use 1234 as the accounting code in both Clubs and Trips, these will be added together.
• Customer Account Type allows you to see a top-level view of payouts from individual account types such as Clubs, Trips, Meals, etc.
• Total amount will simply show you the total amount paid out to the bank account selected in the date range selected.

Settlement statement

To get to the Settlement Statement go to School > Payments > Reconciliation >Card Payments> Settlement Statement. This report is a highly detailed view of transactions that make up each payout. In the filter at the top of the page, you can select the date range and the report will list every individual transaction within that date range. 

Click the green Change button in the filter bar to edit the dates that you want to report on.

Make sure to click Apply once you have set your dates.

This will then generate your Settlement Statement. Click the Download button to export this out of Arbor.

You can also filter the actual columns on the table (such as Customer Account Type or Description).

You can do this by:

1. Click the little arrow next to the column you want to filter.
2. Click the filter icon
3. Select in the tick boxes the results you want to see
4. Click somewhere on the page to remove the little pop up and see the results

Sharing Reconciliation reports with your LA or multi-academy trust

You can share your payment reconciliation information with your LA or trust by either downloading the information and manually sending the file or by setting up a Live Feed. The steps below detail how to create a secure Live Feed to Excel that requires authorisation. For more information on creating and using Live Feeds, see our article here.

Setting up the Live Feed in Arbor

To set up a Live Feed and send this information to your MAT or LA, click Download and then Live Feed.

Once you have selected this option, follow these steps to set up your secure Live Feed:

1. Name the live feed.
2. Leave the Output format field as HTML (Excel, Google Sheets, Data Studio, PowerBI)
3. Tick the Require authentication box.
4. Highlight and copy the feed details URL and paste it somewhere secure (such as a dedicated file on your computer) to send to your trust or LA.
5. Highlight and copy the Authorization link and also paste it in a secure location. The Authorization link is only required once, so the Live Feed can be accessed by the person using the link without it in the future.
6. Press Save.
   

To navigate back to the live feed in the future, go to School > Data > Export > Live Feeds and search for your live feed.

Accessing the Live Feed in Excel

Please note that we only support authentication on Windows PCs, so it is not possible to authenticate on a Mac. If you enable authentication for any Live Feeds using Excel on a Mac, this will break the link and the Live Feed's authentication will need to be disabled in order to work again.

1. In the Data menu of Excel, select From Web.
2. In the following pop-up window, select Advanced.
3. Paste the URL into the URL parts box
4. Type Authorization into the HTTP box using the American spelling and paste your authorisation code (including the word Basic) into the box next to it, then click OK.
   You will then see a new pop-up window showing the data loading.
5. When the data tables appear on the screen, click Load.
6. You will then see a Queries & Connections box appear on the right side of the page. Right click where it says Loading data... and select Refresh to refresh the Live Feed. You can also do this in Data > Refresh All.