Posting Gift Batches to Financial Edge Using Blackbaud Merchant Services

Melissa Walker

Hi all, 

I am not sure where to post this but I am hoping someone can help. We use Blackbaud Merchant Services to collect credit card donations online. We are having a few issues - first off, it takes the disbursements up to two weeks to hit our bank account. Is that normal?


This lag time is creating an issue for our finance department. We create gift batches in Raiser's Edge and post them to Financial Edge, but often times the credit card donations through BBMS haven't hit our bank account yet. And when they do finally hit the bank, the dispersement doesn't match the batches that we used to post to FE. So our Finance director has to manually search through our batches to find those gifts. It is creating a lot of extra work. 


Has anyone else had experience with this? If so, any tips or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much!! 


Melissa Walker

Human Options 

Kate Hudson

This is how long it takes our BBMS transactions to hit our bank. It's not great. We create batches with a GL post date according to the BBMS calendar. I know it's available on blackbaud.com but I can never find it. If someone here can't find it, you can do a chat with Support and they'll get you one. The calednar tells you exactly what date will be the deposit date for the bank based on the time period the transaction occured in. So that date is always the GL post date, and we've never really had issues with the amount or dates not matching.


We do not commit batches in RE and post them to the FE GL until after the money has hit the bank. This is solely for accounting - the lag time between transaction and GL posting is so long it hinders recognizing donors properly unless you do acknowledgements with an uncomitted RE batch that's not posted to FE. We've moved several things, including one of our special events, to paypal because of this huge lag.

Elaine Tucker

We agreed to use BBMS even with the lag time, because of the savings that we got from the one rate fees.


I get an email notification from BBMS when a disbursement report has become available.

I run a custom crystal report pre-posting to make sure all the gifts in RE Match the totals from the Disbursement report. There are time when we have a timing issue - someone gives a gift at 11:58 pm, the RE date is that day, but the BBMS date may be the next day. If that happens I change the RE date to match the BBMS date.

I then post gifts from RE to FE for that specific period. We post by Summary Cash/AR only.


I then open the batches in FE and change the reference field on the SUMMARY lines to reflect that it's a credit card batch and the NET = $#####... what ever the net is on the disbursement report.  


When the Accounting department does the bank reconcilliation, it makes it very easy to reconcile because all the references that have the same net amount noted in the reference field get marked as reconcilled.


If we have credit card refunds, I post those in detail, but also indicate on the reference field in FE the NET deposit so Accounting knows that it goes "with" that deposit amount.