If you work for a payment company handling transaction reporting manually, you’ve probably run into the following problems:
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- Your reports are taking you too long. Scheme reports, such as QMR or GOC reports, can take up to 2 weeks or more.
- You’re not feeling prepared for audits. You don’t have confidence in the accuracy of your current reporting process and are nervous about receiving fines and reputational damage.
- You’re finding it difficult to get a strong understanding of your business portfolio. Manually reporting transactions makes it hard to see the overall picture. It’s also difficult to drill down into each transaction in detail, which is crucial for discrepancies.
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Getting a granular understanding of transactions and producing accurate reports is a complex job, involving meticulous data management and transformation.
There’s a massive volume of transactions and plenty of nuances that create challenges in getting all the information you want from one spreadsheet. However, by using transaction reporting software (like Kani), you can complete reporting faster and more accurately.
This article will run through the challenges of manual transaction reporting, what reports your chosen software should be able to generate, and why you should consider Kani.
In this article:
- What are the challenges with transaction reporting?
- What types of reports can Kani help generate?
- How does Kani help with transaction reporting?
- Why use Kani over competitors?
Want to see how Kani can make your transaction reporting simple? Book a demo
What are the challenges with manual transaction reporting?
Payment companies and fintechs often underestimate the complexity and scope of transaction reporting requirements. However, you’ll likely soon realise that manual methods are insufficient for the agile payments business of today.
Here are the three main challenges you’ll face when doing your transaction reporting manually:
1. Card scheme reports are taking too long to produce, and you’re worried about their accuracy
Our research shows that card scheme reporting, like the QMR and GOC, requires around 150 hours annually per report. Time is often spent gathering and standardising data across multiple sources and in various formats.
One data set might be in a CSV file, while the other is an XML. Manually formatting and inputting data into card scheme reports isn’t just time-consuming: it’s also prone to human error.
Handling a large volume of data and fitting it into a highly specific reporting format is bound to lead to a mistake, even if you have payment experts on your team.
Perhaps worse is that even minor errors are difficult to spot in spreadsheets and only accumulate over time. Producing reports manually means you won’t get an alert if something looks off. While it’s easy to make a mistake, it could lead to serious consequences if you’re audited.
2. You spend so much time manually putting reports together that you don’t have time to investigate discrepancies
Because your team is spending so much time on manual data work, they have no time to focus on investigating discrepancies.
Even a small error, such as a decimal in the wrong place, can lead to significant financial discrepancies and substantial sums being inaccurately reported. These errors are not only costly but also difficult to trace and correct after the fact.
As a result, errors in the report go unnoticed and uncorrected, leading to inaccuracies that affect your financial standing and compliance with regulatory requirements. This can have serious consequences, including potential fines, damage to your reputation, and loss of stakeholder trust.
3. Your internal reports aren’t helpful in keeping you informed on your business performance
Transaction reporting is important for meeting regulatory and card scheme requirements, but it’s also key to getting a good overview of your business.
You may have a few core reports set up, but it’s challenging to get a specific view of your transactions without substantial effort when you’re compiling reports manually.
Say you want to see all of your cardholder transactions on a particular day. Often you use different payment processors that provide data in a variety of different file formats (e.g. JSON, XML, CSV) and data schemas.
Producing daily portfolio analytics requires both in-depth technical knowledge to deal with importing the different file types and knowledge of data elements and file schema to interpret and consolidate the data. Kani automates this process by importing daily data files and presenting them in reconciliations and reporting.
Likewise, your internal reporting might be too rigid and not particularly helpful for the rest of your team. Imagine your CFO (or another decision maker) needs to access data quickly. Without using a transaction reporting platform, this can take hours of work to set up. Even once the legwork is complete, sharing files is often messy. Someone can delete the file by mistake or lose the password without means to retrieve it.
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for a tool or software to help you overcome these challenges.
As a company that has worked on these challenges first-hand, we believe that investing in quality software is the best solution to get a handle on your transaction reporting (rather than doing it manually, or spending a huge amount of resources on developing your own payment reporting API).
So, if you’re looking for reporting software, what type of reports should it be able to generate?
What types of reports should your transaction reporting software generate?
Your transaction reporting software solution should be able to create these key regulatory, card scheme, and business intelligence reports:
Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC
You’re probably already familiar with the QMR and GOC. Mastercard and Visa require scheme members to submit detailed reports, covering transactions processed over a quarterly period. If your company doesn’t submit accurate and timely reports, it could face fines, penalties and damage to its reputation.
Collating and standardising transaction data from multiple sources to meet the specific formats required by Mastercard and Visa is time-consuming and error-prone. Your transaction information is probably all in different formats, and matching it up with card scheme requirements is painstaking.
Thankfully, transaction reporting software can help you fill these reports out in seconds, saving your team hundreds of hours each year.
FCA daily safeguarding reports
Monitoring and ensuring the integrity and security of client funds daily is crucial for in-scope payment companies and fintechs. These reports allow you to quickly notice and amend discrepancies, reducing the risk of financial fraud and ensuring compliance with FCA regulations.
However, manually completing safeguarding reports each day is a major resource drain for your team. You need someone committed to completing this every day – a sub-optimal use of time for a process that is easily automated.
Leveraging automated software also drives data accuracy. With daily safeguarding, even one small mistake can cascade, leading to bigger problems later. Effective software will flag a discrepancy instantly, so you can log on to the platform and investigate.
For more details on safeguarding audits, read our safeguarding audit article.
Settlement and authorisation reports
Settlement and authorisation reports are essential for reconciling payments, managing cash flow and ensuring that all transactions are accurately processed and recorded.
These reports help you identify any issues in the payment processing lifecycle, such as delayed settlements or authorisation failures.
A good transaction reporting software will allow you to create these reports accurately in seconds.
Transaction monitoring reports
These reports monitor transaction patterns and flag suspicious activities, and are essential for good portfolio management.
For example, you might want to track when there’s a large volume of high-value transactions in a short period of time (such as five transactions of £10k in a day, which is unusual for your business).
Transaction monitoring reports also help you maintain compliance and protect against financial crimes.
Mastercard invoicing report
When Mastercard sends an invoice, it usually comes as an unstructured text document that is difficult to interpret. Transaction reporting software designed for the payment industry would parse this invoice data and import it into a database for easy reporting and analysis.
This helps you understand and reconcile Mastercard charges, so you can make sure that fees quoted are accurate and justified. It’s essential for saving your business money because, if you’ve been charged too much, you can follow up—providing you have the reference data to substantiate your claims.
Without transaction reporting software, you would need to rely on your IT department to sift through Excel sheets to find the aggregates. By using software, you can easily see a breakdown of what you’re being charged for, streamlining the entire process and saving your team valuable time and resources.
How Kani helps with transaction reporting
Many payment companies and fintechs try to perform transaction reporting manually at the outset, quickly realising how difficult it becomes at scale. If this is you, and you want to save both time and money, consider trying Kani: the only transaction reporting software built by payment experts for the payment industry.
Thanks to our knowledge and expertise, our platform helps you fulfil your reporting obligations without a hitch.
Here’s what you get with Kani:
Generate accurate reports quickly with pre-made templates and easily investigate errors or anomalies
Card scheme reports like QMR and GOC are often time-consuming and error-prone, especially with transaction data from multiple sources and formats. The data you receive from processors often comes in various formats, making manual input into spreadsheets unnecessarily complex.
Kani solves this problem by automatically standardising and cleansing your data and inputting it into pre-made templates, ensuring compliance with regulatory technical standards. With our platform, completing your QMR and GOC reports in the correct format takes only seconds.
Our platform also offers real-time alerts for any issues in your transaction data, allowing for quick resolution. You can customise alerts to notify you via email or Slack and set specific rules to catch suspicious activities early. We can even send notifications to people in your team who aren’t signed up for Kani, such as your senior leadership team.
Be prepared for audits with automated compliance reports, audit trails, and user-specific permissions
Preparing for audits and ensuring compliance can be daunting at the best of times. When you complete your reporting manually, you’re probably going to feel nervous that there’s a mistake somewhere.
Kani allows you to prepare for audits at a moment’s notice. Our platform automatically generates compliance reports, significantly reducing the likelihood of unnoticed errors. If there was an error, Kani would have flagged it immediately, and you’d already know about it. This proactive approach enhances auditability and minimises the risk of non-compliance.
The platform also has a full audit trail, so it’s easy to track any changes to your transaction data. You can also easily give read-only platform access to your auditor, so they can find what they’re looking for.
This applies to internal audits as well, helping you maintain a comprehensive audit history effortlessly.
Kani controls fraud risk by using raw data, restricting complete manipulation, and stamping changes to ensure traceability. The sign-off capabilities allow reports or reconciliations to be sent to senior management for approval, with alerts for any subsequent changes.
Understand your transaction data better with pre-made dashboards and visualisation tools
Understanding the impact of individual transactions can be difficult if you’re just looking at data in a spreadsheet. But Kani’s visual tools make customer behaviour and transaction patterns much easier to analyse so that you can make informed decisions about your business.
With intuitive graphical visualisations, you can see important data at a glance and use it to guide strategic decision making. For example, you can easily create a pie chart to compare online versus in-store transactions.
We also offer self-serve reporting, giving you the flexibility to report on what’s important for you and your team. These dashboards are white-label, so you can add your own branding and share with customers.
The dashboard also has a hierarchy capability that lets you quickly investigate a problem and drill down to the individual transactions. With Excel, you’d have to rummage through multiple reports to find the right transaction. With Kani, you can find what you’re looking for in just a few seconds.
Why use Kani over other solutions?
Kani is the only platform built specifically for payment companies. While other transaction reporting solutions can drill down into individual transaction data, they lack the expertise we have when it comes to payments. This allows us to easily create reports that other providers may find complex.
For instance, imagine you’re trying to build a transaction report to investigate fraud. Understanding transactions’ four-digit merchant category codes (MCC) can be difficult without prior knowledge of what they mean.
With other software solutions, you’d see these codes next to transactions, but you’d have to go through each processor’s guidelines to figure out what they mean. And to make it even more complicated, each processor has different codes.
But, during our solution build phase, we’ll work with you to build your solution around incoming data to automate MCC categorisation based on pre-defined criteria.
For example, the platform can quickly surface all transactions over £2k spent in UK hotels by matching up the MCC codes with the right categories. This allows you to closely monitor any suspicious behaviour and mitigate fraud risk.
While Kani is very much self-serve, you still have access to Kani’s team of payment experts for guidance and support when needed. For example, if you want to set up a self-serve report but aren’t sure how, we can meet with you to help you set up the perfect reports for your business.
For further information on the different reporting and reconciliation solutions available for payment companies, check out this article: Account reconciliation software: What’s the best option for payment companies?
Make your transaction reporting simple and accurate with Kani
Completing your transaction reporting manually is time-consuming and prone to errors. Even if you’re a payment expert, it’s not a good use of your time.
By investing in transaction reporting software like Kani, you can save your team hundreds of hours per year and reduce the risk of fines and reputation damage when you’re audited.
Try Kani today: book a demo
