RecChat: PayTrac Updates - 09/22/2021
Learn more about PayTrac's latest updates from 09/22/2021 in this RecChat discussion.
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Zach Malloch is joined by Bret Alarcon, Jordan Tipson, and Samuel Pollock to discuss PayTrac updates. The group discusses new features available now to the PayTrac dashboard, tracking settlements, and some features to expect in the near future.
Recording
Transcript
Zach Malloch 0:09
Its wonderful when I hear that on a Wednesday, special edition of RecChat for everybody joining us today, we're joined by some special guests here also, Bret Alarcon with me as always. Jordan Tipson from product management, one of our product owners joining us today to talk about some of these new features and Sam Pollock one of our newer support members who's been jumping in the front lines of some of the credit card and PayTrac operations. Real quick housecleaning, housekeeping housecleaning, that's what I need to do after we have the session. But for housekeeping, we have a q&a session a nice little Button right at the bottom of your Window. If you could ask any questions for Jordan, or Sam or me or Brett right there. That would be great, helps us keep track of it, we can bring them up in conversation, we can respond directly to you. And I think that's basically it. I'm gonna hand it over to Jordan, since he's got all the cool stuff to show us today. How's it going?
Jordan Tipson 1:03
All right Thanks Zach. Alright, so I'm gonna share my Screen. And we're just gonna hop right into it today. So let me know when you can see my Screen. I can see your Screen now. And you can see my RecTrac Screen, I assume?
Zach Malloch 1:16
Yeah, I can.
Jordan Tipson 1:17
Alright, sounds good. So what we're gonna talk about today is something that, you know, we're really excited. For here, Vermont systems. It's something that you know, the team I've been working on with PayTrac, kind of from the very first process all the way through, you know, obviously, customers going live, as many of you out there are live with PayTrac already. One of the big needs that that we really started to notice with customers is just help doing reconciliation. So we obviously have some reports and RecTrac that you can run some credit card reports, cash journals, GLs. But you know, a big kind of problem I'll say is that, you know, with the cut off times for PayTrac transactions, whether it be for E commerce or for card Present Transactions, it just makes it a little tough to try to match everything up. So we, you know, put our heads down and thought, Well, how could we try to make this a little bit easier within RecTrac. And what we've come up with is the PayTrac dashboard, which, you know, the dashboard itself, this is kind of the first new feature of the dashboard. But what we're going to show today isn't necessarily the PayTrac dashboard, it's kind of just like a hub, for all things PayTrac related, and we're gonna continue to grow this PayTrac dashboard to have different things. You know, today we have the monthly statements, which probably everybody has seen already. And then just with their latest release of oh nine, we have the settlement data. So we're gonna hop right into this, I will say that I'm going to show some stuff that isn't released yet. So obviously, RecTrac, three, one 1009. Oh, was just released, I believe it was last week, or maybe late the week before. So we do have a planned Interim Release, probably the second week or so of October, that's going to have some of the additional stuff that I'm going to show today in there. And a lot of that stuff is feedback from people that have already started to use the dashboard, some interviews that we did kind of displaying the dashboard to some of these customers that are currently using PayTrac before it was released. So we've got some nice changes that aren't available today. But I think a lot of people will like them out there. So one thing that you'll notice, so I'm just going to Click on my PayTrac dashboard. And again, this is stuff that some of the stuff is going to be released in the Interim Release. But when I Click on my PayTrac dashboard, you'll notice we've combined the two statements program and the settlements program together. So hopefully, you know those folks out there that do a lot of maybe like monthly reconciliation, you're used to already seeing this paycheck statements inquiry program. So same exact program, it runs automatically, you know, on the seventh of the month for the prior month. And it just gives you the breakdown of all the transactions by date that you did for that previous month, all the fees,
excuse me, everything associated with it. So again, just same exact program, nothing that needs to happen on anybody else's site out there, just combined into this program, because again, we want to make this PayTrac dashboard, really a hub for all things PayTrac related. So today, we just have the statements and the settlements, which we'll get into. But I expect to see kind of with every release and every Interim Release, you'll start to see new Tabs on the top of different things that you'll be able to do within here. So I'm not going to touch on this here. I'm hopeful that everybody already is using this for their month end statements. Again, it runs automatically for you, we set that up and we onboard you. So again, that's going to be all of your transactions for the prior month. But what I really want to get into is the settlements here. And that's kind of the guts of this RecChat today is to really kind of go through what we've we've been up to here at Vermont systems on the PayTrac team. So what we have here is kind of two side by side panels here. So the left hand side is going to be all of your approved settlements by date. So that's a key word and I'll probably say it a bunch of times the key word is approved set comments. So, you know, just to kind of get that out there today, like if I do a transaction right now in PayTrac, if I come into this PayTrac dashboard, I'm not going to see that transaction, because again, we're keying off approved settlements, the settlements that have already happened. And kind of back to what I started this with, is saying, you know, with the dates and the times to have to go in and say, Okay, did the transaction happened before 9pm Eastern, or did it happen afterwards, is it on this batche or on that batch, we felt this program is going to be very helpful, because instead of you having to put in, you'll notice there's no timeframes here, there's nothing in here that you need to do. It's just keying off that settlement date. So any transaction that was part of a settlement on this date will start to display in here. And what we've done to try to make it a little nicer for you as well, is we've grouped and done sub totaling by settlement date here. So if you're a customer out there, you know, most PayTrac customers at minimum have two merchant IDs. So I'll call those mids that's what we call those, typically one for your ecommerce transactions, and then at least one for your card present or retail transactions. But you could have, you know, 1020 30, different mids for card Present Transactions, but typically always just one for for Card Not Present, which would be EComm. So in that case here, for example, if I go down to maybe like the fifth here, you'll notice that if I had let's say, again, you have 10, different meds, 10 different merchant IDs set up, well, then you would have 10 different settlements for the fifth year, and it would all display on here, individual lines for each one. And then you know, give you the breakout here. So again, what we do is by date here, because a lot of places that, you know, we kind of interviewed with PayTrac, just on how things are going, you know, kind of step one is, you know, okay, I have 10 different mids, and this is, you know, it all gets deposited to the same place. So I need that net amount. If that's good, then maybe I move on for my day, and I'm good to go for that date, I don't need to do any more reconciliation. Or maybe if it's off, I need to start to drill down. So what we did is kind of on this just initial view is again, for example, on the fifth of August here is I can look at my total amount. So this is what I total, you know, took in total transactions for the day, my net fees that were backed out. So those are the credit card fees that are you know, taken out of the transactions, and then your net amount that was deposited. So again, this is all kind of test data that we work with here at VSI. But if I was looking at the Vermont systems bank account, on the fifth, I should see $5,454.22 deposited into my account. And again, that's under the assumption that maybe all of your merchant IDs go to the same bank account. If that's not the case, then obviously, you can just expand this and then you can get the actual breakdown of how it makes up that total amount that your sub totaling by. So in this case here, this VSI test account took in this much. And then this baker stable little card present account that I have took in this much of 92 cents. So again, you can really kind of drill down, I only have two mids set up just in my database for testing purposes. But again, if you had, like I said, 10 different mids, then you would have 10 Probably settlements here on this, obviously, you didn't do any transactions, maybe it's a seasonal place. But you would you would see kind of a breakdown of all of those mids.
So I'm gonna get into the you know the rest of the Screen, you'll notice some different colors out there, I did want to just chat about the top here. So you do have all of your DataGrid filters in here that are the same throughout RecTrac. One thing to keep in mind is this, these grand totals at the bottom here, that's going to be for all of the records that you do have selected or that you are displaying within the data grid. So if I wanted to, you know, filter down here, if I do something like this, you'll notice now it's going to filter down to I think I have it set to honor after. So now it's obviously totaling everything up based off those date, if I choose a single day, that's probably a bad day. If I choose a single day, you'll notice now it's essentially the same because I'm just filtering down to that one individual time here. And again, the rumor that's approved settlement times here, settlement dates. A couple other just kind of housekeeping things within here is you can do some some different things in terms of how you have your items filtered here. So by default, we thought, you know, most places by date is probably going to be the most common, you know, on Wednesday, I want to see all the settlements for Monday, or whatever it may be. But if it's easier for you, if you come in two options here, you still have kind of all the same DataGrid filters that you're accustomed to. But if you go to Show Settings, kind of a cool one that I use sometimes if I'm really trying to dig into something is instead of grouping it by the date here, maybe I'll do it by Profile description. So when I do this and then close out, you'll notice now instead of the you know breakouts all by dates. Now if I do this one here, I just see the settlements specific to this merchant ID. Or if I open this one up, I see all of the settlements specific to that ID. So again, we kind of allow the flexibility for you to get in there and kind of do what you want. But the default will be by group, and then I'm sorry, by settlement date. And then you know, obviously all of the subtotal thing that happens within that as well.
So that's kind of step one on the left hand side here. And all of the things I'm talking about right now, these are all available today, there's nothing that I, there's stuff on the Screen that I haven't showed yet that that isn't available, but will be in a couple of weeks. But you'll notice when I came in here, I had a couple of different colors here. And this is really important. And I think this is kind of one of the cool things, you know, with PayTrac. And this, this dashboard for settlements, is we wanted to really try to make it easy for you as you're reconciling, if we know that, hey, you know, maybe there's a double charge out there. Obviously, we don't like double charges out there. Do they happen? Yes, sometimes they do happen. But what we want to do to help make things easier for you is we want to display kind of just by a visual cue that pay maybe something's wrong with this transit or with this settlement for the day. So in this case, here, you'll notice I have a green line for this Baker's table line here. So to us, that means there's kind of a one to one relationship with transactions that actually processed and receipts that actually happened in RecTrac. So again, there should always be at least kind of a one to one ratio, whereas this bottom line here is yellow. And again, this is a bunch of test data that I've kind of pre configured. But a yellow line means that there's probably somewhere out there where it's not a one to one relationship, meaning maybe you processed 101 transactions that actually physically got processed. But in RecTrac, we only have 100 receipts for those. So again, we don't want that to happen a lot. Green is obviously very good in here. And that's what most times it should be, if not all the time. But if you know things happen, I know we had an outage maybe a month or so ago, where the internet or we're processing went down. And kind of those, you know, there was a five minute span of some Limbo transactions? Well, we want to try to make it really easy for you to be able to say, Okay, this, you know, yellow line here on this VSI test account, there's probably something off, if I look at my net amount here, and my bank for the day is probably not going to be the same. And we kind of take that a step further now. And when you Click on any of these settlements here, so if I Click on any of these, for example, this one here, now we get a load, and this happens, whether it's yellow, or green, we load every single transaction that happened for the day. So again, in here, you can start to view things. This is one of the pieces that's not released that it is available in a couple of weeks is that when I do do something like that, we're gonna essentially kind of highlight or really point out that one transaction that hey, this transaction for $4 got approved, but we don't have a receipt and RecTrac for it. So that right off the bat kind of takes a lot of time out o
f going through everything, and maybe exporting it to Excel and finding, okay, where are we off? What did we do wrong, where's the receipt number. And obviously, like kind of a key telltale will be this receipt number column here. Again, this is a bunch of test data that I just pre configured. So I don't actually have receipts for any of these, these are just kind of transactions I, you know, created, you know, just, you know, as a as a test. But for example, if I Click on this one here, you'll notice that I have my receipt number my cash drawer, the user that process that if I run in some and I'm sorry, if I run into shifts, the batch number it was associated with, you know what settlement is part of. So that's kind of a telltale sign right there is if I don't have a receipt number that should really help you, on your settlement side to know that this is the one that's incorrect. And then you know, typically a call to support or ticket with support, maybe we have to link in no valid credit card Profile, maybe we have to do some things to reconcile that individual transaction. But again, it should take a lot of time out. If they do pop up, it should take a lot of time out from having to really investigate, you know which transaction it is.
A couple other pieces that are pretty cool within this transfers DataGrid. If you'll notice, if I do select on the DAT and an item in the DataGrid, I get a little pop out to the right here. So just a couple of things that you know, again, today we offer three things, this will start to expand as we go as well. But I can see the fees associated with that transaction. So this was $1.10 transaction, there was a fixed fee of 11 cents and a percentage of seven cents on this more just kind of useful information as maybe you're going live to just kind of check and view things out. But really, these other two buttons are kind of the the nice ones from here. If I look at credit card history, I can kind of see all of the details for this. So this might be helpful in a situation where maybe there was an issue, but I can come in and kind of grab a lot of the details. This helps us on the support side too. It just kind of takes a step out of having to copy the receipt number and then go into a different program, the more we can kind of just stay within this dashboard and take a look at things it's going to be easier. And then the other one here too is just to be able to reprint a receipt. So if you're in here, maybe you had a hive Volume transaction that you want to reprint the receipt out just a quick way in here without again having to exit this program to go to a different thing to then maybe reprint the receipt or do something from there. So again, those kinds of features are all available today. Those are things that that made it out in the release. A couple items here that I do want to show that didn't make it in the release that are pending here for the Interim Release. And this was a big one, a lot of customer feedback is this search option at the top here. So I know a lot of times I'm cc'ed on some emails, or I get some emails, you know from from our support team. And a lot of times they have maybe your receipt number or a transaction and say, Hey, I'm not sure what date this settled on, are you able to help me figure out what they settled on. So we thought it would be a really nice feature in here is if we can kind of take the guessing out of the equation. And if I know the receipt number, which is probably couldn't be the most common thing that customers are going to know. You know, I'm looking at a receipt or I have a receipt or I see it on a cash journal. And I'm just you know, I'm not finding it anywhere. Instead of making you kind of go through literally everyone and search and search and search, what I can do here is I can just plug that receipt number in.
So let's just scroll over here. So I've got 1295610. So if I do that and hit search, you'll notice what's going to happen is it's going to drill right down to the settlement that it's part of. So again, this is a really nice new feature not available today. But in the coming weeks here in mid October, to take a lot of the guessing out of you know, when did this transaction settle, or what batch was it part of, I can just grab that receipt number, plug it right in, and it's gonna bring me directly to the settlement that it's part of. So that's a really cool on that that, again, didn't make it out in the initial release, but it is available. As you can see, it's working fine. I can search by transfer ID number. So if you are in Finix, and you want to grab the transfer ID, if that's easier, or even the settlement ID, you can search by those probably things that aren't going to be used quite often. Certainly receipt number probably being the majority of the time to make things a lot easier for you. So that's kind of it with the dashboard, a couple of things to just chat about to today. So today, we don't have a report that can print out that's kind of first step that'll be part of that, that release in October as well. And the idea behind that is basically you can just come in and Click on, you know, for example, if I choose these two, and then I grab another one, for example, then same kind of deal that we have over here with a slider, a slider would pop out on this side, and it would just say, you know, print a report or something like that, I haven't quite figured out the wording on it yet. But then when I do that, it would basically print similar to a credit card report of just what you have selected. So that's really going to help you know, I know some of our customers out there, you know, they need a printout to then attach to like a bank statement or something or the deposit for the day.
So again, that'll take out a lot of the having to put in the times and the dates and maybe running it twice, because you got to account for midnight. So they're really just to be able to highlight something or multiple settlements, and then have a record kind of printout of all of the details similar that you just that you see within here. So that's kind of a big one. The other thing that you can certainly do today, just like with any DataGrid, if I did really want to kind of maybe investigate this 1385, I can come over here and dump this to Excel if I wanted to. So I can dump this out to excel. And it's all in excel at that point, I can work with the data there. Obviously not ideal report was would be much nicer. But but certainly in the interim, the next couple of weeks, if you do need to dump this out, you know, you don't need to go and try to figure out a report that'll have the exact same information, you can just dump it right to excel from here. So that's kind of it with the dashboard. We do have some new columns coming out. And I would certainly recommend, you know, for people out there if there are things you want to see in this transfers, DataGrid you know, cash, your receipt, number, user name, those are all obviously things that you know, everybody probably uses, but maybe like the credit card mask, or different things within this, this DataGrid maybe that might help your reconciliation. We could certainly look to add those columns within here.
But I think Zack, I think that's kind of it. It's a lot. I guess one last thing we do have these I'm sure most of you are aware of these, but in any DataGrid you can expand it out. So if there's some you know, you want to work kind of full Screen within here. Looks like I got a little bit of a bug going on that we'll fix. But you can expand it out to make it full Screen if you would prefer to see kind of a full on view of it. Just some other things too that we're looking to kind of we already have In the works as well, is obviously, you know, in this scenarios where you do maybe see a yellow line, which means maybe something is incorrect. And let's just say, you know, it's this line right here, we've already pointed out this line is the incorrect, you know, the $5, you know, has processed, but it doesn't show in RecTrac, to kind of try to expedite that process and maybe making an automated process to help fix that. So, a new Button here, potentially, that maybe has like no valid credit card Profile already kind of linked to that Button, and then maybe a little dialog Screen of what I want to do to be able to fix that transaction directly through this and not have to like Log In Log out as a new user, make sure I you know, remove a Profile relink a Profile. So to be able to do some different things within here. Everything in here is permissions based. So I know maybe some of you out there are thinking, oh, there's a lot of information that we don't want everybody to see, all of this stuff is permission based, it follows the same permissions with what's kind of everything in RecTrac. So you can certainly not have this display for for some of your staff or, you know, allow kind of the things that the staff can do and can't do. So. Something really cool. Again, we're gonna constantly be adding to this program. So we certainly welcome any feedback. It's been released for about a week. Now, we've definitely gotten some good feedback so far. But certainly from you know, my side on the product side, the more feedback, the better, the more you know, different things people want to see out there to help you guys reconcile with PayTrac. You know, we're all for it. And we want to make a lot of those changes, you know, that customers want to do rather than just kind of what we think would be good out there. So that's kind of it, Zach. Really excited for it.
Zach Malloch 21:40
Yeah. Well, I mean, understandably, there's a lot of exciting stuff. There. We have DataGrid, we have the SuperGrid, it almost feels like we need a new name for these types of Yeah, no, right. Yeah. I mean, I guess before that point, it sounds like you've basically wrapped up, we still have about nine minutes to go. So we can certainly end early. But you were talking about feedback, or if anybody had questions, if anybody had any suggestions or ideas for this, this would be a great time for that. But like I said, I have no problem ending the session just a little bit early. I know everybody's got a lot of stuff going on. So we'll just kind of chat here for a few moments. Brett, do you have a credit card related joke to us? I know, a theme on there now and you weren't prepared?
Bret Alarcon 22:24
caught me off guard.
Zach Malloch 22:25
Sorry. Any joke would work? While we're letting people think the questions. Maybe Sam has one for us? I don't know.
Jordan Tipson 22:33
Yeah, I would just you know, point out obviously to if you are a paycheck customer, which I believe everybody on this call is if you don't see the dashboard in your menu, so when you search PayTrac, you should see the PayTrac dashboard here. One, if you're not on oh nine oh, if you're on anything before that, that would be one reason why you don't have it. And two, it could just be permissions based, you might have some Menus that aren't updated automatically when you do run your updates. So if there are any people out there that are PayTrac customers, which again, I think everybody is certainly just let us know, we can we can make sure that that's activated on yours. But it should be a pretty, pretty simple and easy, easy fix.
Zach Malloch 23:16
That's what Danielle says, or Daniel said was his question.
Jordan Tipson 23:20
I'm a mind reader.
Zach Malloch 23:22
Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. So yeah, that's, that's great. I think that when we don't have too many questions, that only means that you presented the information in such clarity and comprehensiveness, Jordan, there's no room for questions to exist. So I'd say that's a perfect RecTrac
Jordan Tipson 23:44
Perfect,
Zach Malloch 23:46
does have questions or feedback. I assume they could get in touch with you or
Jordan Tipson 23:50
yeah, definitely
Zach Malloch 23:51
open a case and get in touch with us.
Jordan Tipson 23:54
Sounds great.
Zach Malloch 23:55
Well, if nobody has any closing thoughts, we can just go ahead and end the session.
Jordan Tipson 24:00
Perfect. Thanks, everybody.
Zach Malloch 24:02
Yeah, thanks, everybody. Talk to everybody soon.