Integrated Payments make our lives easier by automatically sending the payment amount to a connected payment terminal & auto-counting these during your Finalised Takings
Sometimes, the figures you see in your takings might not match what you have recorded on the settlement receipt from your connected Payment Integration.
Read on to find out a few reasons that might cause this.
What’s in this guide?
- Why don't they match?
- What are the causes?
- How can we check which payments are missing?
- Still not able to match them up?
Why don't they match?
Integrated Payment terminals are integrated with Lightspeed for the following two purposes;
- To automatically send the requested payment amount to the integrated payment terminal without any manual intervention from the user.
- To auto-count any integrated payments during the Finalised Takings process.
Lightspeed doesn't receive any figures from the payment terminal during your takings, we are just auto-counting any payment that we have triggered through Lightspeed during your takings.
What are the causes?
If there are figures in your Reconciliation Report that are different to what you can see in the settlement report from your Payment Terminal, this can be caused by one of the following three reasons;
Settlement Period
Each payment terminal will have its own settlement period, your Lightspeed Reconciliation Report has no bearing on what this is, this period will be set by your payment provider.
Eg: Tyro generally has a default period of 5 am to 5 am which means that it will record all transactions during that period as part of its settlement.
If you would like this to match your Reconciliation Report, please contact your Payment Processor so they can help to match your settlement period to the time that you perform your takings.
Transactions entered manually through the payment terminal
Integrated Payment integrations are only able to record transactions that are entered through the Lightspeed POS and then sent to the terminal via the checkout menu.
If a payment is entered manually through the terminal this won't be recorded under that payment in Lightspeed, you will need to create enter this through Lightspeed using a Manual Payment button.
The transaction didn't complete in Lightspeed
When a payment is sent to an integrated payment terminal to process, we will first contact the server of that payment processor. This will trigger the transaction to appear on the payment terminal.
Once that is processed and approved, the payment terminal will attempt to send that transaction back to us, on some occasions this request may timeout which means your payment terminal will have an Approved transaction while that sale is still open in Lightspeed (you can find out more details on what causes this to happen here.
If this happens you should use a Manual Payment type to close that sale in Lightspeed.
Timezone Settings
Lightspeed relies on a few settings to ensure data is reported correctly.
1) Device time - The Lightspeed register must be set to the correct timezone and time on the device you are using with Lightspeed, we use this to timestamp sales.
Here you can find the steps for iOS and Android.
2) Company Timezone - This is set in Back Office under Company Settings
3) Site Timezone - This is set in Back Office under Site Information
How can we check which payments are missing?
Every payment terminal will allow you to log in to their portal and export the full transaction listing from that terminal. The example we will use here is Tyro, but the premise will be the same for all payment integrations.
Export the Payments from Lightspeed
For the Reconciliation Report in question, goto;
- Back Office
- Reports
- Reconciliation
- Find the Reconciliation Report you are investigating
- Select the eye symbol next to the report
- Select the Payments tab
- Click the cloud icon to download the payments as a CSV.
Export the Payments from Payment Processor
For the example payment terminal, we are using (Tyro), to export their payment listing you can follow the below steps.
Log into the Tyro portal.
- Go to the Data Export tab on the account settings page.
- Select the data content and the date range for the period you wish to download.
- Click on the Download File button to download the CSV, which can be saved to your local disk.
Find & Match transactions
Once you have downloaded the CSV file from Lightspeed and your Integrated Payment processer, open both CSV files in a spreadsheet application of your choice.
We recommend using Google Sheets which is free!
- Step 1 - Arrange the column by descending in the Lightspeed CSV
- Step 2 - Arrange the columns by descending in the Payment Processor CSV
- Step 3 - Delete all columns from the Payment Processor CSV except (Sale Amount, Date/Time, Card Type) Note: These columns could be labelled slightly different from your payment provider.
- Step 4 - Cut those 3 columns and paste them after the last column in the Lightspeed CSV, it should look like this.
You can then match up the transactions from your payment terminal against Lightspeed, if you end up with a bunch of transaction at the end that you don't have in Lightspeed (check the next days takings report as they could be in there)
Still not able to match them up?
Reach out to our Support Team with your findings from the above by selecting the ? anywhere in Lightspeed and selecting "Speak to the Support Team" and you can chat with our team to help troubleshoot the issue.