How to Reconcile Your Bank Statements (Canada Only)

Reconciling your bank statements with what you see in your RebelGive Control Center is a crucial task for any financial administrator. Let's take a dive into how to do this as a church with a Canadian RebelGive account.

But before we begin, it's helpful to know how to download reports from your Transactions Panel (or at least know how to filter for specific transactions). To learn how to do this, click here.

Important Definition

What you might be familiar calling batch deposits, we like to call transfers. Throughout this article (and elsewhere in our Help Center), we use these terms interchangeably, favouring transfers.

Gift Payout Schedules & Transfers

At the end of every day, all available processed gifts are deposited into your account in batches - or what we like to call transfers.

As you begin to receive transfers in your bank account, you'll notice both the 1.9% transaction fees covered by the Giver and their intended gift are deposited together. Every month, you’ll see a withdrawal for an amount totalling the previous months’ worth of transaction fees covered by each Giver. This leaves you with all the intended gift amounts remaining in your account.

What you may also notice is that there is no itemized list in either your bank statements or in your Control Center of which transactions belong with which transfers in your bank account.

While we partner with CardConnect as our card processor, it is specifically FirstData Canada (FD Canada for short) that handles all the information regarding each transaction that takes place for your RebelGive account. FD Canada doesn't share that information with either CardConnect or RebelGive. This means, while you will see a transfer in your bank account, you will not see an itemized list of which transactions are included in that transfer in your Control Center.

How will I know which deposits are from RebelGive?

Deposits on your bank statement that corresponds with a Transfer from RebelGive will have a line item description in the following format:

MCDP12345678900 MSP or VIDP12345678900 MSP

The MCDP corresponds with MasterCard Deposits, while the VIDP corresponds with Visa Deposits. And the 11-digit number is your merchant ID (MID) within our card processor's system. This number will never change, and neither will the MSP at the end. This should be helpful with identifying which deposits are your RebelGive Transfers.

Reconcile Your Bank Statements

As a Canadian church, to reconcile your bank statements and what you see in your Control Center, you will simply need to do a bit more manual tracking of what gifts come in through your Transactions Panel.

To begin, you'll first want to access your Transactions Panel in the main menu. Here, you'll see all transactions up to date - possibly including ones that have yet to be transferred to your bank account.

So how do we know which transactions are a part of which transfer on your bank statement?

Thankfully, credit card (and Visa/MasterCard debit card) gifts are almost always processed within 24 hours of when they were given, so typically whatever was given yesterday will be transferred to your account today. This makes keeping track of which gifts were included in each transfer easy. Simply add all the gifts given the day prior and it should match with today’s transfer in your bank account!

The easiest way to do this is by filtering out which transactions are still pending. You can do this by clicking on Filters and then selecting Successful so that only those transactions that have a Successful Status will be visible.

Next, scan through and manually add the gift amounts plus the covered fees. For instance, if you have a transfer that landed in your bank account on November 22nd, it's safe to say that no gifts that were given on November 22nd were a part of that transfer. Instead, add up all gifts given on November 21st (and their covered fees).

If you still run short, it's possible a couple of the last gifts given on November 20th made it into this transfer as well, depending on what time of day they were given on November 20th. (This is because there is a cutoff time of 8:40pm EST each day for creating transfers, so if a gift is given after that time, then that gift should end up in the following transfer.)

Following the example above, if you were looking to download a report of only the gifts associated with the November 22nd transfer, click on the Dates filter and select only November 20th and 21st. Doing so, only those gifts will appear in your Transactions Panel.

Scroll down to the bottom and click Download Report. Once you open the .csv file in your preferred financial program, simply manually delete which gifts from November 20th don't belong in that transfer (if any).

More info on First Data Canada