I am wondering what other merchants are doing from a bookkeeping perspective to verify that payments received from their merchant provider match with the orders they ship.
Our setup is:
Orders processed with realtime payment via authorize.net - payment auth and captured at time of order.
Order downloaded via Monsterbooks to QB.
Order shipped.
Payments settle around midnight.
I apologize if I am being vague - I'm not an accountant - just trying to satisfy those who are.
In a perfect world, orders for say 10/31/2006 would total $xxx and the settlement summary for 10/31/2006 would also equal $xxx. If it didn't, that would be a discrepancy to be addressed.
The reality is that even setting my settlement time for say 23:55:00, someone will place an order at 23:58:00 or the settlement will get delayed to 00:02:00. So the daily figures will always be off a bit.
I already know that the numbers match - they pretty much have to since we only ship after receiving payment. I just need a check for accounting purposes that doesn't require a lot of manual screwing around.