Billing and bookkeeping

Bookkeeping workflows in Swift Fox billing: reconciling deposits against your bank, bulk payment entry, collections and accounts receivable, and Canadian EFT batches.

Reconciling Deposits

To make it easier for bookkeeping purposes, Swift Fox has a dedicated system for keeping track of bank deposits of payments received from customers. All customer register entries of the type “payment” will appear in this system.

1. Open Billing → Deposits from the left menu.
2. All un-deposited payments will appear at the top, and any completed deposits at the bottom.
3. If you are making a deposit of cheques and cash for example, you can either click every transaction on the left, or select all of the ones of a certain type (Cash, Cheque) to select them en-masse.
4. Selected deposits will show in purple, and will update a total at the bottom right. Make sure this total matches the amount that you have on your bank statement, or that you are about to deposit at the bank.
5. Select the account that you are depositing this into, and then click the Deposit button immediately next to that dropdown.
6. Your deposit will now show at the bottom of the page. You can click the “View” link and then “Print” to generate a deposit slip for use by the bank.

Bulk Payment Entry

If you receive dozens of cheques in the mail, it can be tedious to pull up each customer account individually, so Swift Fox has a page that allows for the rapid entry of payments across different customer accounts.

1. Open Billing → Bulk Transactions from the left menu.
2. Start typing the customer number or name in the box, and all matching accounts will appear below.
3. Click the correct one, and a prompt for a new register line will appear, as well as a history of their past transactions.
4. Enter the details of the payment (eg. “Cheque #0411”), the amount, and click the Add button.
5. Click “New Search” to go to the next customer.

Collections and A/R

Swift Fox has a standard accounts receivable aging view, that supports both accrual and cash-basis methods of calculating the amount owed by a customer. This is helpful when determining who to call for collections, or what accounts may eventually be written off as bad debt.

1. Open Billing → A/R Aging from the left menu.
2. Customers are shown in order of highest-owing to least, with the amounts broken down by the number of days they are due.
3. By default it will show the report effective today, but you can change the date at the top.
4. The “Show All” button includes customers that are not overdue, or that have a credit balance. It can be useful if you want a list of all customers with their balances.
5. Clicking the “Download” link will produce a .CSV file that you can import into Excel, Google Sheets, or any other spreadsheet program.

Canadian Legacy EFT

Swift Fox supports a bulk-file submission mechanism for EFT in available in the Canadian banking system. Unlike credit cards or American ACH, this system is not automatic. It requires generating a file that is manually uploaded to the bank, with the returned payments manually entered a few days later (usually from a fax). It is remarkably old-school, using 60-year-old mainframe data formats, but it is cheap and fairly standardized so most banks support it.

If you would like to support direct debit without getting set up for this, check the list of available direct debit capable merchant providers that Spreedly offers, these will work more like credit card transactions where returns and failed transactions are handled immediately - but they may have higher transaction fees.

1. Check with Swift Fox if your bank is not listed in the Canadian EFT section of the Payment Providers tab under Billing → Settings. Any bank that supports CPA Standard 005 (1464-byte EBCDIC file) should be supported, as well as TD’s proprietary 80 character format.
2. Set up the details of your EFT account in the billing settings page based on the information the bank has provided you.
3. Upon install, have customers provide a void cheque and sign the appropriate direct debit authorization form provided by your bank. Enter the institution, transit, and account number from this cheque into the automatic payment section of the client account.
4. On a monthly basis, you will need to generate a file to send to the bank. You can do this from Billing → EFT.
5. Make sure the dropdown says “Generate New EFT”, and set the date of the file that you are generating. This should match one of the EFT billing days that was set up on the settings page. Most ISPs use the 1st of the month, so pick the 1st of the next month as you are sending the file in advance.
6. Click “Generate” to download the file. This is what you’ll upload to the bank. It contains the account details of every customer, in plain text, so you should take care to securely delete the file when you are done with it.