Merchant Payment Statements - Streamling A/R Accounting

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The online web world is the way to go, and the more integrated your processes are, the tighter the bookkeeping. New Merchant Payment Statements are a contributor to the ongoing improvements at Intuit.

Each small improvement being made is part of a bigger goal Intuit has to make bookkeeping less work, more accurate and audit ready. 

Let's look at how the new Merchant Payment Statements make things faster and better.

QuickBooks Payments

We can't put the 'cart before the horse', so we must realize that all of this is possible only if you have turned-on and been approved for QuickBooks Payments (in the US). 

QuickBooks Payments allows for mobile payments, emailed invoice payment options and recurring auto payments all inside QuickBooks Online which means you do not need to track down when or if your customers have paid you since all Accounts Receivable related transactions live in QBO giving you total visibility of payment processing.  

Smart Invoicing

A few months ago, Inuit released Smart Invoice allowing for a dashboard glance at the status of an invoice.

To access the Smart Invoice Dashboard, use the Navigation Bar to open the Sales Center, then click on Invoices and you can view the Status of each invoice.

Merchant Payment Statements

The new improvement in streamlining the accounts receivable process is doing more of what already works. Bank and Credit Cards do it, and now so does QuickBooks Payments. The new Merchant Payment Statements are available at our fingertips inside of QuickBooks Online.  

Statements from the previous month will be available by the 5th of the current month. If no statement is available for a specific month it means there is no merchant activity for that month, and statement history will be accessible two years.

Another nice benefit is who can see the statement. Any master admin, company admin, accountant, and custom users with limited roles including sales users, will be able to view and access merchant payment statements.

What’s on the Merchant Payment Statement

The statement is setup similar to a bank or credit card statement with three sections.

(1) The Main Summary section includes:

  • Deposit date
  • Batched gross deposit total
  • Returns
  • Fees charged
  • Net deposit total

(2) The Fee Type section includes how each transaction was processed:

  • Card Keyed fee rate and count
  • Card transaction fee rate and count
  • Check transaction fee rate and count
  • Reject fee

(3) Deposit Summary Type of payment processed section:

  • Amex payments
  • Check payments
  • Discover
  • Master Card
  • Visa Card

Reviewing Merchant Payment Statements

To access the Merchant Payment Statements begin at the Company Gear Icon, then select Account and Settings, choose Payments, now select Statement and the time period.

It may not be 'extreme' but each improvement throughout your workflow means more productivity. Time is valuable! How much so? That’s a can of worms which Ron Baker can probably answer best.

What we do know is each step is part of the climb to a better way and all these adjustments in behavior add up to more accurate books in less time.