What is Reconciliation?

The Reconciliation report tracks every penny of real money movement during a given period. This report includes details on card authorizations, transactions, and releases, as well as reimbursement payments, platform funding, and more. Each report includes a starting and ending balance to aid finance teams in close of book activities. 

This report will track only real money movements. Notional money movements, such as benefit contributions or expirations, are not included in the Reconciliation report.

What to know

Date and time

This report is organized chronologically using the event timestamp, which is when the money movement occurred in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time). It will be in reverse chronological order, starting with the end balance value and concluding with the start balance value for each account.

Account types

This report utilizes a double entry ledger format, and registers debits and credits against both available and held balances. Available balances represent the funds currently in the account, while Held balances represent funds that have been held for payment, but have not yet left the account. The Reconciliation report will include the held and available balances for up to three accounts, depending on your specific configuration.

• Stripe Issuing: Balance available to fund direct Benepass card spending only
• Stripe Treasury: In some cases, your account may use Stripe Treasury to hold a balance to fund outgoing reimbursement payments.
• Unit: Balance available to fund outgoing reimbursement payments, pretax contributions, and direct Flex card spending.

Reporting category and subcategory

This report utilizes categories and subcategories to allow you to filter down to only specific types of spending or funding as needed.

• Employer funding
  • Platform funding: Incoming funds from external sources into the Benepass ecosystem for the purposes of funding benefits (excluding HSAs).
  • HSA contribution funding: Incoming funds from external sources into the Benepass ecosystem for the purpose of funding HSAs only.
• Card spending
  • Card authorization hold: Funds held by the merchant at the time of sale. These funds remain held until the transaction closes.
  • Card transaction: Final amount charged by the merchant. A debit, represents a typical card transaction. A credit can occur in the case of refunds.
  • Card authorization release: Funds released by the merchant back to the account once the transaction closes.
  • Refunded card transactions: Funds returned to the employee following a refunded transaction.
• Employee payout
  • Reimbursement payout: An ACH payment to the bank account of an employee for any approved reimbursements under a given benefit. Payments may group multiple reimbursements if they were approved shortly after one another.
  • Returned reimbursement payout: The return of an attempted reimbursement payment due to closed employee bank account or similar. 
• Transfer
  • Internal transfer: Funds transferred between Unit and Stripe.
  • HSA card spending reconciliation: Funds transferred between Unit and Stripe as a result of accidental employee spending on the wrong benefit card.
  • HSA reverse mistaken distribution: The reversal of funds that were incorrectly distributed from an employee's HSA account, if applicable.
• HSA Contribution
  • Contribution: Funds contributed to an employee HSA.
  • HSA reverse mistaken contribution: The reversal of funds that were incorrectly contributed to an employee's HSA account, if applicable.
• Dispute
  • Dispute won: Occasionally transactions are disputed due to fraud or other unresolved issues with the merchant. Disputes are adjudicated by Visa, and if we win the decision, funds will be returned to the account under this subcategory.
• Other
  • This category will capture any money movement not outlined by the subcategories above, and will include additional detail in the subcategory field. 

How to navigate the Reconciliation report

On the Reconciliation spending report, you'll be able to:

• Choose your date range
• Set filters
• Aggregate by reporting subcategory
  • By default the report will show all events
• Export the report to a .CSV

Considerations

Authorization, Release, and Transaction discrepancies

Most card transactions will have an associated hold and release, but all three individual line items may not perfectly match. For example, if you order groceries via Instacart, Instacart might place a $100 hold on your card. If they don't have all of your items available, the final transaction may close for $75. In this example, on the Reconciliation report the Stripe Issuing available balance would be debited $100 for the authorization hold, debited $75 for the transaction, and credited $100 for the card authorization release.

Additionally, authorization holds and releases may occur over the course of separate days. As such, you may see authorization releases at the start of the period without a corresponding transaction. This is because the hold and transaction may have taken place at the end of the previous period.

Comparisons with the Posted spending report

At Benepass, we utilize two forms of money movement - notional and real. Real money movements have a direct impact on available cash balances, such as outgoing ACH reimbursement payments, or credit card spending and are the basis for the Reconciliation report.

In contrast, notional money movements are changes to employee balances that do not tie to a change in cash balances. For example, an employee receives a $100 monthly contribution. This is a notional money movement that is reported via the Contributions & expirations report and is not present in the Reconciliation report. 

The Reconciliation report tracks only real money movements and therefore will not tie perfectly to the Posted spending report, which tracks both real and notional money movements. For more details, please review Reconciliation Report and Posted Spending.

Questions? We are happy to help! Please reach out to the Benepass Admin Support Team by emailing admin@getbenepass.com.