Clarifying Daily Reports and Payment Reports

A common financial question we get is that some reports don’t seem to reconcile with one another.  In particular, that some participant or transaction reports don’t reconcile with payment reports. There is a reason for this.  Payments follow a settlement calendar that is dictated by the banks and credit card processing companies.  Settlements typically cut off at 10:00 pm GMT (currently 6:00 pm EDT).  This means that transactions that happen after that time on a calendar day will be reported on that calendar day on the RSU system in participant or transaction reports but may show up on a subsequent day in a payment report because of settlement cut off times.

Said another way there are a few reports that sum up transactions but use a calendar date versus the settlement cut off date that is used for payments.  There are two reports in particular where we have noted this difference.  They are the Transaction sort by date in the Race Dashboard/Financial/Summary.  The other report where this occurs is in the Partner Dashboard under Financial/Top Races & Clubs.  If you run these reports by calendar date they will not match payments due to settlement cut off times. You will never reconcile them unless you take a period from when before processing starts and after it completes – like a few days before you accept registrations and a few days after you close (note that some races keep things like donations or stores open year round and therefore you will never stop taking transactions).

We know that reporting is important to you and it is our goal to provide accurate and timely reporting about your races.  It is also our goal to get your money to you for your races as quickly as possible. This results in two different ways of looking at the data.