How to reconcile GoCardless Income

This help guide article covers how to reconcile GoCardless Income.

Within ExpensePlus there are 2 choices for how to reconcile GoCardless Income (you will need to pick the one that will work best for you):

Option 1: Splitting payouts manually using the 'mixed income' option - This can be a good option where you have only a small number of GoCardless Transactions or all transactions are typically either just card donations or relate to just one event (and you wish to bulk together similar income transaction and do the same with fees) - typically not recommended.
Option 2: Adding GoCardless as an account and uploading and reconciling transactions - this option is typically best for most churches and charities.

IMPORTANT: You should not reconcile payouts from GoCardless as 'Income Received' as GoCardless deducts transaction/application fees, so recording the net amount that arrives in your bank account simply as income is incorrect from an accounting perspective. Instead, choose one of the above options - both of which enable you to ensure the gross amount of income collected is recorded as income, and the transaction/application fees are correctly recorded as expenditure.

Option 1: Splitting payouts manually using the 'mixed income' option

Reconciling GoCardless payouts appearing on your main bank account statement

When you reconcile your uploaded bank transactions, select the GoCardless payout on the left-hand table of your match transactions screen, click the + button, and then, in the popup that appears, select the transaction type as 'mixed income'.

Within the 'Enter Mixed Income' screen, enter the details for the transactions in the GoCardless payout:

Named Donations - a line per donation transaction
Less Expenditure - for the total of the fees deducted (typically grouped into a single expenditure line).

Top tip: if you are finding the process of splitting payouts as described above tedious or time-consuming, then we'd recommend you consider option 2 which is far quicker and doesn't require manual data entry.

Option 2: Adding GoCardless as an account, and uploading and reconciling transactions

Reconciling GoCardless payouts appearing on your main bank account statement

When you reconcile your uploaded bank transactions, select the GoCardless payout on the left-hand table of your match transactions screen, click the + button, then, in the popup that appears, select the transaction type as 'Payout from Payment Processor', and then select your GoCardless account.

Note: you will need to set up GoCardless as a payment processor account before you can do this - click here to find out how to do this.

NOTE: the 'ChurchSuite Donations' option will be hidden when setting up GoCardless as a payment processor if you are not using ChurchSuite and your system-wide settings within system settings are correctly set. If you are using ChurchSuite, be sure to set this to 'Yes' to ensure that the donation method gets automatically set as 'ChurchSuite' (ensuring that donations don't get included within Gift Aid claims in ExpensePlus).

NOTE: This first step will temporarily make your account balance of your GoCardless account balance in ExpensePlus go negative (until you upload your GoCardless transactions).

Downloading GoCardless transactions

Within GoCardless, to find the payout you are needing to upload:

1. Select 'Payments' on the sidebar menu

2. Then select 'Payouts' on the sidebar menu

3. Click on the payout you wish to download

Then select 'payout breakdown' in the top right corner (as shown below), then 'export'

In the popup, select 'Export'

Note: you may wish to contact GoCardless to change your payout frequency to 'weekly' or 'monthly' in order to remove the need to download multiple different payouts.

TOP TIP: contact GoCardless to change your payout frequency to either every '7' or '28' days to avoid having to reconcile multiple payouts every month (which also has a far greater chance of leading to mistakes with uploads).

WARNING: Once downloaded, don't edit or resave the file, or change the file format from .CSV to .XLS/.XLSX, as it may stop the file uploading to ExpensePlus properly.

Importing GoCardless transactions

Within the bank reconciliation screen, select your GoCardless account and click 'upload transactions'.

The upload process works similarly to a regular bank account, except that, each line on the statement will show as two transactions within ExpensePlus - one relating to the income and the other to the transaction fee deducted.

Once payout transactions are uploaded, your GoCardless account balance should return to zero (because the net total of the transactions in the payout report you've just uploaded IN to this account should exactly match the amount paid OUT as the payout went from this account into your bank account).

IMPORTANT NOTE: If your latest account balance within ExpensePlus for your GoCardless account is not zero we highly recommend you fix this issue BEFORE you reconcile transactions - please see this separate help guide article.

Note: If you are unlucky enough to have a 'Failure Fee' transaction line within the payout statement you upload, then in addition to importing your payout file, you will also need to manually import that one transaction (as this doesn't get picked up when the file uploads).

Reconciling GoCardless transactions

The bank matching process for GoCardless transactions works similarly to a regular bank account - with the ability to remember and quick match transactions.

This means that once you have reconciled GoCardless transactions for the first month, you won't need to manually enter these transactions for future months - instead, you can simply click the 'quick match income' button at the top of the match transactions screen.

Where transactions haven't been previously reconciled and auto-remembered:

Named Donations

(1) select the transaction in the left-hand table of the match transactions screen;

(2) click the '+' button to the right of the transaction;

(3) select the 'Named Donation' option in the popup and enter the details.

Card/Payment Process Fee

To reconcile transaction/application fees:

(1) select the transaction in the left-hand table of the match transactions screen

(2) click the '+' button to the right of the transaction

(3) select the 'Card/Payment Processor Fee' option in the popup and enter the details

If you are using ChurchSuite, the 'Description to Remember' field should automatically shorten correctly for you, in order to enable fees relating to donations or a specific event to auto-match.

Why is my GoCardless statement not uploading?

Most likely, you are not uploading the statement detailed above. Whilst you can try uploading a different formatted statement, for it to work, you will need to update the column names, and the file must contain ALL of the following headers (spelt exactly as stated below):

resources.charge_date (each transaction must contain a date)
resources.description (each transaction must contain a purpose/allocation)
gross_amount (each transaction must contain a non-zero amount)
customers.given_name (each transaction must contain a name)
gocardless_fees (each transaction must contain a transaction fee)
customers.company_name (the header is needed, it can be left blank)
customers.family_name (the header is needed, it can be left blank)
app_fees (the header is needed, it can be left blank)

(additional columns can be present but won't be imported).

The file format should be .CSV

To better understand the Bank Reconciliation functionality, please watch the module overview video here.