Reconciling Volt Payments
Note that this guide is for customers accepting transfers directly on their own bank accounts. If you’re using Volt Connect, you do not need to reconcile your own payments.
Three aspects are important to be able to reconcile your own payments.
- Having a bank account which can receive Volt payments (bank transfers) and either notify you when payments arrived or be able to provide you access to statements in real-time.
- Matching the incoming Volt payments (bank transfers) with the orders in your system (reconciliation)
- The handling of payouts and refunds by your system.
Note that Volt payments will appear on your statement as regular bank transfers. If you already receive bank transfers as a payment method then the same reconciliation process should apply.
Bank account requirements
To receive GBP
Your bank account should be able to accept Faster Payments (FPS) and CHAPS. Most UK bank accounts will support both methods.
To receive EUR
Your bank account should be able to accept payments via SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Instant
Important note about SEPA Instant
Volt will initiate transfers as SEPA Instant whenever possible. This means your bank account needs to be able to receive this type of transfer. Unfortunately some banks will accept SEPA Credit Transfers but not SEPA Instant, which means that sometimes payments fail for this reason, often immediately and without any indication that the transfer type is the problem. If your bank account does not currently support SEPA Instant, or you are not sure, please contact Volt and we’ll work with you to find a solution.
To receive SEK, DKK, NOK, BRL, AUD
Your bank account just needs be a domestic bank account in each of the respective countries.
For any other currency
Please reach out to support@volt.io for more information
Reconciling Volt payments (bank transfers)
Bank transfers have four aspects which are typically used for reconciliation. That is (listed based on priority)
- The transfer amount
- The reference appearing on the bank statement
- The date of the payment or a date range to allow for delayed payments, and
- Remitter details, e.g. remitter name and accounts details such as IBAN or account number. The remitter in this case would be what we refer to as your shopper
You should be able to access this data either via your online banking platform, via an API* supplied by your bank, via structured bank messaging or, in the case you already have an existing reconciliation method, your treasury or similar system.
In order to match the payments arriving on your account, we recommend fetching a report from Volt containing the payments which were initiated by Volt. You can download the relevant data in CSV format using Volt Reporter.
| Volt | Beneficiary’s bank | Matching |
|---|---|---|
uniqueReference |
Reference as shown on the bank statement | Loose match, e.g. fuzzy logic. Note that some banks might change the reference and replace certain characters, e.g. “ä” with “ae” or “a”. This is why we don’t recommend an exact match. |
amount |
amount as received on the bank account | Exact match |
createdAt |
booked or processed immediately | Check a reasonable enough date range, e.g. 14 days. |
shopper.iban(not always available) |
Remitter/originator IBAN | Exact match |
shopper.name(not always available) |
Remitter/originator name | Loose match, e.g. fuzzy logic |
merchantInternalReference |
Not available | Exact match. Get it from the Volt report. |
Note that the shopper / remitter details are not always shared by Volt while they are always available when you fetch the data directly from your (beneficiary’s) bank.
Transacting in high frequency
If you expect multiple payments from the same shopper to arrive on your bank account within the same day or even shorter time periods OR if you generally have a lot of payments arriving, then it becomes important of how often you get updates from your bank about the incoming Volt payments. Say your bank credits your account immediately but only shares the report of that processed payment an hour or even a couple of hours later. That impacts your ability to process the orders in time.
Please contact your bank about that. It is unfortunately outside of our control but has in other cases led to issues for some of our customer which is why we want you to know about it.
Payouts and refunds without Volt Connect
When you receive Volt payments (bank transfers) directly to your bank account, Volt has no access to those bank accounts. That means Volt can’t initiate payouts or refunds for you. You have to initiate those yourself from your own systems or with your bank.
Payouts and refunds are bank transfers from your bank account to the shopper’s bank account. For that, you need access to your bank account and permission to initiate transfers. You can initiate transfers from your bank account either via your online banking, via an API* from your bank or via internal tools, in case you already have existing systems accessing your bank accounts, e.g. treasury or finance systems.
Identifying the associated shopper or order
Before a payout or a refund can be issued, you have to identify the respective shopper or order related to it. This process is the same as for reconciliation, so following our recommendation allows you to do that.
Issuing payouts and refunds
Online banking typically allows you to either
1. initiate individual transfers manually
2. initiate batches of transfers, e.g. via file upload for PAIN* or CSV files.
Please reach out to your bank which options are available to you.
Volt Reporter provide relevant details to generate the respective files
*Payment Initiation (PAIN) – PAIN.001 is a payments initiation message by ISO 20022. It depicts a Credit Transfer message in an XML format.