I don’t seem to be able to find a specific answer anywhere on my question - any help welcome.
I’ve recent signed up to WorldPay, and have a portable terminal. The monies taken by this device are deposited into my current account.
I’ve just setup a dedicate merchant account for this, so that
can transfer my funds across to this via bank statement tagging, so that I can allocate multiple invoices to transactions which are grouped together, as per the following handling merchant payments
Monies deposited are not subject to a deductible percentage - this is a separate monthly invoice.
Question 1: Upon bulk tagging, everything appears in my WorldPay merchant account as a negative figure - correct?
Question 2: I have already created invoices (prior to monies being deposited) which I believe that I need to allocate specifically to the merchant account? Is this possible via tagging, or do I need to manually allocate a payment via the invoice?
Do these tagged/allocated items have or need to be allocated to a specific deposit, or just the merchant account generally? I appreciate that this is probably a more bookeeping related connection to the same topic.
Question 1: Upon bulk tagging, everything appears in my WorldPay merchant account as a negative figure - correct?
Tagging alone wouldn’t affect your balance - you would need to have added extra entries for it to turn the balance negative. Although I don’t use WorldPay, I’m guessing it would be the same as Stripe for example, in which case your balance should never be negative.
Question 2: I have already created invoices (prior to monies being deposited) which I believe that I need to allocate specifically to the merchant account? Is this possible via tagging, or do I need to manually allocate a payment via the invoice?
The money in transaction in your virtual bank account would simply be tagged to the relevant invoice. If they lump payments together (so you end up with say, 3 customers in one payment), then you can delete the lump payment and separate them. For example:
Customer 1 pays £50.00
Customer 2 pays £25.00
Customer 3 pays £125.00
WorldPay lumps this together and it shows as £200.00 in my bank. I can delete this and replace it with the 3 above, each allocated to the correct invoice.
What you will find, is out of the £200.00 in my example, only £198.00 would hit my actual bank account because of the fees taken by WorldPay. So once the payment is deposited to my bank account, the WorldPay account will sit at +£2.00. This is tagged to ‘Bank Charges’, or to a purchase invoice for the same.
For Question one, thank you for confirming an unaffected balance. I should also reiterate that while I am using WorldPay, and that it is supported by QuickFile, i’m not using this setup.
I do not have an online payment facility, only a PDQ machine. Money is delivered into my account as and when I use it to the full invoice amount. I pay a fixed monthly fee and am invoiced for this, which goes through my books. So there is no world pay fee to consider with my incoming transactions.
My need for manually setting up a merchant bank account it to be able to keep track of incoming WorldPay monies, be able to accurately allocate multiple invoices to single deposits.
Deleting the transaction and setting up multiple entries is a little cumbersome, and would mean that I wouldn’t have merchant breakdown of all the incoming monies (which I will set up auto tagging for to make life simpler).
So at the moment, when I use bank tagging, then select “bank transfer between accounts” then select “transfer from…” I have a choice of Current Account, or WorldPay Merchant account".
I’m transferring to my Worldpay account, not from. This seems to be the issue here. If i select WorldPay at this point, it places the account into a negative figure.
So what you would have is what you already have - a sperate merchant account.
So, here’s what I would do, assuming no money is taken from the money received (eg fees):
Have your merchant account
If you’re creating invoices after money has been taken, mark them as paid from the merchant account (thus creating a ‘Money In’ transaction). Your merchant account would then be a positive balance.
When WorldPay send you your actual money, whether it be a lump sum or not, enter it into your main bank account as a money in transaction, and tag as a transfer from the merchant account - therefore reducing your balance to 0.00 (unless other transactions are pending payment to you)
When WorldPay invoice you your monthly fee, create an invoice as normal for the supplier WorldPay and category of Bank Charges
When the money leaves your main bank account, create that money out transaction and tag it to the invoice, therefore making it paid
Hopefully that makes sense. Here’s an example:
1st Sept
Bill pays me £50.00 via WorldPay machine
Invoice of £50.00 is created, and marked as paid from the Merchant Account
2nd Sept
Ted pays me £75.00 via WorldPay machine
Invoice of £75.00 is created, and marked as paid from the merchant account
7th Sept
WorldPay very kindly deposits £125.00 in my bank account, which I record and tag as a transfer from the merchant account (making that balance £0.00)
30th Sept
WorldPay invoices me £1.25 fees for the transactions in September. I create the invoice against Bank Charges
1st Oct
£1.25 leaves my bank account for WorldPay, I tag this against the invoice.
Hopefully I’ve understood your situation correctly, and hopefully that helps!
When you bulk tag from your bank (i.e. all the deposits from WP) from the WP merchant account, it should create negative entries on that WP account. Now when you go to those invoices and mark them as paid, you do so to the WP merchant account and the entries from the transfer should be completely balanced.
If WP are invoicing you separately for their services and not rolling it into the payments they make to you, it would in theory be possible to do away with the WP merchant account altogether. You could tag that WP deposit on your bank directly to one generic invoice to a client such as “Worldpay Sales”. However this only works if all you’re interested in is booking in the headline numbers. If for WP sales you want to raise individual invoices for clients you’ll need to split out that detail into another merchant account.