Generating a Weekly Report in CP Terminal
This step-by-step guide shows Charity Business CP Terminal (online card payment) clients how to generate weekly reports for their accounting purposes.
Step #1
To generate your reports first you need to logon to the CP Terminal system. Then select Reports from the Lobby menu.
Step #2
Once in the Reports section take a close look at the menu options. We will go through these one-by-one below, but in broad terms they allow you to filter all the interactions (sales, failed transactions, specific timeframes etc) so you can get a focused list of those transactions in which you are interested.
Step #3
The first menu option is the Transaction Type. Leave it on ‘All Transactions’ to show all activity, but for more specific reporting you will want to pick a sub-set. To determine what monies were paid via the CP Terminal system you will want ‘Successful’ transactions, ie those that completed the payment process. Please note that some of the options may not return any results if your forms do not capture such data.
Step #4
Next up is Card Type. The ‘All Cards’ option will be the one you want for a general weekly income report, but you may be interested to see if your users have a preference for a specific card type. Please remember that while AMEX is shown, this card type is NOT SUPPORTED and so will never show as a successful transaction.
Step #5
The Source Menu allows you to select which ‘route’ the monies came through. This is split between All Users (which shows ALL transactions through CP Terminal), Specific Users (here the blurred entry is a user name, but if you had three users called Larry, Barry and Gary each of these would be listed as separate entities and show ‘over the phone’ payments processed under each logon) and Internet (which shows just those payments made by users who paid using the online form through your charity’s website). For a weekly income report, select “All Users”.
Step #6
If you have a web campaign set up, the Web Campaigns menu allows you to filter your report to include payments either made through one single web campaign report on all web campaigns, or to report on all transactions (it is the mirror of the Source menu). In this example there are two distinct campaigns – donations and new campaigns. Selecting a specific campaign will just show transactions for that campaign, selecting All Campaigns will report on all web form ‘sales’ and All Transactions will report on both Web Campaigns AND telephone payments put through by users. For your weekly report, set this to “All Transactions”.
Step #7
The next level of filtering is that of Date Range. These are critical to generating an accurate weekly report. The left hand menu sets the start date and the right hand menu sets the finish date. CP Terminal accounts run from Saturday through to Friday – with those monies transferred into your account the subsequent Wednesday to hit your account on the Friday. So, for a report to show what monies were paid on 26th March 2010, you would set the left menu to 13th March 2010 and the right hand menu to 19th March 2010.
Step #8
When you are happy you have set the filters correctly click either of the Submit buttons. Both have the same effect!
Step #9
The returned report will match your filter settings will look like this. You may need to scroll horizontally to see all the information. It allows you to have a very quick check that your report filters are set correctly. The most recent transactions are shown at the head of the list. Where there are many results these are shown in pages, which you can move between using the ‘next’ and ‘back’ controls found at the left hand foot of the results table. You can also set the system to display 5, 10, 20 or 50 results per page.
Step #10
Now the on screen display of the results is informative but this is not the best way to see your report. Importantly if you have set any custom fields as part of your online forms they will NOT be displayed. What you need to do is use the “download this report” feature. This will generate a CSV file that can be opened in Excel or similar spreadsheet application.
Step #11
A few seconds after you have clicked the “download this report” link this dialogue box will appear. Open will start up your spreadsheet application, while Save will save the file to your computer.
Step #12
Once opened your report will look like this. You will have all the collected information on each transaction included by your filter settings. In a spreadsheet you can manipulate your report far more effectively than via a web-interface.
Please make sure and experiment with reports system and note down the settings that produce the reports you want. Then download your reports on a weekly basis.
Step #13
One additional feature that may be useful is the Search Menu. This is useful when users query a payment. It allows you to filter for specific transactions, say in response to a query from a user. Here you set the field to be searched (TxCode, Donor Ref, Appeal Code, Phone or Email) and then you enter the text you want to search for in the box to the right. This will return any entries that have matching text in that field – but ALL the other filters still apply so make sure to set your date ranges.
The reports system for CP Terminal is very flexible, please make sure that you experiment to get precisely the results you want. A printable PDF version of this guide can be downloaded here.
