What are best practices for reconciling bonterra payments?

Thanks for sharing how you approach reconciliation. We are about to make the shift and are developing new processes. Any lessons learned you are willing to share?

Hi ​@patricko, not alone with this.

We ran a test in Aug’24 and what could previously be accomplished in 3 clicks took 297 clicks after the switch. For the same reasons you’ve outlined: lack of settlement batch ID and requirement to open each payout one at a time. We attempted multiple pathways to escalate this which finally included getting a meeting with the team working on Bonterra Payments. They took our feedback but I haven’t heard an update since. At that time, their only solution was that there was no solution until they roll out an update to reporting. If you’re facing this too and are able to lift it up to your account executive, I can only hope that hearing it from multiple sources might speed up the improvements!

On our side, the improvements we were able to find were negligible: e.g. you can select and copy & paste from a report to skip the export>unzip>rename file… we also do as much manipulation of the data as possible in the EA report to confirm contributions in one batch before we export.  (like grouping contributions by date range and if the total matches the equivalent payout, we slightly decreased manual matching time). Truly our solves are negligible compared to the improvement having a settlement batch ID/Payout ID on the report would be..but it was the best we could come up as far as workarounds! Thanks for asking this, I’m curious if anyone else has found better!

​@patricko Thank you for sharing this feedback, and thank you ​@veronica for walking through this with our team in the past. 

I’m on Bonterra’s Product team, and improving Bonterra Payments reporting is on our roadmap. We’re planning broader updates to our reconciliation tools, but I appreciate your suggestion to enhance existing reports in the meantime. Our goal is to make reconciliation faster and easier, so I’ll bring this idea back to the team and explore what updates we can prioritize.

In the meantime, could you share which specific fields are most important to your process — and why? That insight will help us build smarter, more efficient workflows.

Frankly, at this point, I would not recommend making the shift, but if you do I’d recommend keeping an eye on this thread for more advice. 

Thank you for echoing this and for the tips. It’s truly been a huge disappointment. Like how are you building something that’s going to make us work even more 

If you’d like to have a consultation about this, we can schedule some time to talk. 

I don’t have practical steps to share about reconciling Bonterra payments manually, but I know someone who might and will see if they can contribute knowledge here. Meanwhile, I had an interesting conversation this week with a person who said a great use of a data lakehouse with an AI feature for querying would be financial reconciliation. Both for the data matching piece that is tedious, and for how it could presumably learn to do it faster.

Not everyone has a data lakehouse at their disposal but if your organization is using one already for other purposes, this could be a good additional use case. 

I’m sharing a writeup I did for a client on generically how to reconcile but I (and clients) have echoed manyof the frustrations listed above. 

The following process was what Rumi learned when assisting another EA client with a Bonterra Payment Gateway. Rumi and her other client gave extensive feedback to the EA Product Team on why this process was not ideal.  This is not official documentation of how to reconcile Bonterra Payments with your accounting system (it was written up by Rumi in 2024 because the existing EveryAction “Success Guide: Accounting Reconciliation” documentation did not address how to reconcile accounts while using Bonterra Payments)

Bonterra Payments fees are not listed as a column within EA reconciliation reporting or contribution reports and the fees only show up in the separate Gateway Transaction Reports.  This makes reconciliation very challenging for accounting teams.

In order for accounting teams to reconcile what's deposited in the bank against what's in EveryAction, it appears to Rumi that clients have to do the following: 

1. Download the contribution or reconciliation report with the online reference number column added to it

2. separately download a Payment Gateway Transactions Report

3. use the online reference number on the two reports to calculate the fees, because these are NOT exposed in EA reporting (i.e. add a "fees" column to your downloaded EA contrib or reconciliation report, and then use vlookup on the online reference number to fill in the fees for each contribution.)

4. Separately download the Payment Gateway Payout Report potentially to match up deposit batches with what shows up in the bank. Note that each Daily Payout Report with detailed breakdown can only be downloaded ONE AT A TIME by querying the payout date, clicking a link and downloading it.

As an aside -- I am former EveryAction staff (2016-2022), current EA consultant.  I have known and deeply respected Lily Ickow for many years. 

She is outstanding and if you get a chance to meet with her to provide feedback on this situation, jump at that chance.  Sincerely Lily is one of the smartest, most capable, thorough, reliable, fantastic people you will ever  encounter (not just at Bonterra but, like, in life.  But yes, specifically as Bonterra’s VP of Payments, I feel so lucky she is there!!!). 

HUGE FAN OF LILY ICKOW OVER HERE!

So while I too have been frustrated on behalf of clients with the difficulties in reconciling using Bonterra Payments, I also know that when Lily asks folks for constructive feedback, it’s not just for optics -- like all great product leaders, she really does want client/user feedback so that the product will be improved to best serve their clients.  It’s not just a PR thing!