Running eBill Service Reports

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hi and welcome to eBill training. Today, we're going to be reviewing the more commonly used online reporting features, which will include a review of the dashboard, which will give a biller a high-level overview of all of their payments. And then we'll go into the more detailed reports and demonstrate the features are available.

Now, one thing I want to just note is that all of the detailed reports that I'll be going through do work the same way. So we'll spend time going through one report, and then those same types of features that I go through on the initial report will be available in all the reports. For more details on these reports and the features and functions available that may not be covered today, you can refer to the eBill user guide.

So when you initially log on to Payment Center, you'll land on this look-up customer screen. To access the online reports, you're going to come up to the far right corner of your screen, and you're going to click on the nine little boxes here. Once you do that, you'll be presented with different features that you have permission to access. And you'll go ahead and choose the Online Reporting application.

So as I said at the beginning, when you first come into the reporting tool, you're going to land on a dashboard. And this is going to automatically default information regarding payment transactions for the last seven days. Now, should you want to change that view, you can click on the dropdown here and see payment transactions as of yesterday, the last 30 days, the last 90 days, this month, last month, this quarter, or this year. So you can change the view by simply clicking on one of the options here.

At the very top, it will give you an overview of all of the payments that have been processed, including the number of payments as well as the dollar amount associated with those payments. It will also break down the number of pending payments that are going to be processed in the next seven days. Again, the number of transactions as well as the dollar amount.

If there were any payments returned-- so these would be ACH payments that came back as NSFs, or Non-Sufficient Funds-- those would be listed here. And then customer enrollments. So these are customers who have actually gone on to the online customer-facing web portals enrolled in that application.

As we continue down here, this will take those payments processed, and it'll start to just graph it out. So for those of you who like to see more graphical representations, you can utilize these graphs here. So, again, this is the payments processed activity. These are the payments pending. And if there were any payments returned, those would be available here. And then as we get down into some of the other statistics, it changes off to a different type of a chart. And these are your customer status changes.

So it will show you as far as the number of suspended, active, and then revoked. And then over here to the right, shows you the number of customers who have actually either enrolled or unenrolled. So this dashboard just gives you a very quick overview of your payment activity. It's a nice report for maybe somebody at an executive level to go in and just view what's been processed over the last seven days or if they want to take a more historical view and just get a quick snapshot of the activity.

The next report, or the group of reports, are called the payment reports. And under this, you will find payments processed, payments by entry date, payments returned, payments refunded, payments unprocessed, pending, and unsuccessful. So I'm going to go through the payments processed report-- this is one of the more commonly used reports-- and just show you all of the features that are available. And again, these same features are available in each of the reports that are listed off to the left here.

So when you first come in, you're going to be presented, again, with the payments processed. It's going to default to the last seven days. You still have the same options here to select from. The other option that you have is that you can go in and you can actually specify your own date range. So maybe we want to actually look at reports from June 2 to today's date, which is-- or let's just say the 13th. And you're going to note, then, that those values are going to change.

Now, some of the things that you can do here, this manual payments, this may or may not appear on a screen, depending upon the biller's setup. So if a biller is not allowing what we call manual payments to be made, then this box wouldn't show up. But as a rule, we don't typically include those manual payments, so these would be payments that are made kind of outside of Payment Center. But maybe somebody comes in with cash, for example.

And so we do have the ability for you to actually record that transaction so that in the daily files that are being sent, it's recorded. But we typically don't include those in our values here, unless you go in and actually click this box, and then those values will be included.

Now, this also offers you the ability to export this whole report as an Excel or as a PDF. And I don't typically see too many using at this level as far as an export, but it is available for you. Now, as you scroll down, you're going to notice that we have some graphs here. And if you want to take a look at specifics-- so I can turn this off, and now I'm just basically looking at this data. I can turn it back on, and I can turn this off. But you can play with this report a little bit more to kind of satisfy what it is that you need.

I want to take a minute to go through the various payments down here, as far as these graphs, because this is a nice visual in terms of the payments that have been processed. And in this particular case, the one on the left, the different channel through which the payment was made. So, again, this is going to depend on how the biller's site was set up and whether they're actually taking these types of payments. But what this does is gives you an idea of how many of these payments came through the enrolled web portal. It will give you the volume as far as the dollar value, and then it will show you what percentage of those transactions were actually made through the enrolled web portal.

The call center agent is Payment Center. So if the organization allows payments to be taken over the phone by a customer service rep, they would make those payments through the call center agent, also known as Payment Center, and it would track how many of those payments came in through that channel as well as the value. Simple Web is a customer-facing portal where they create a user ID and password, and so that channel is also reflected here in terms of the dollar volume and the percentage of payments.

The Guest Web, again, another channel which is customer-facing, where they can make payments quickly. And then you may or may not have-- again, depending upon the setup-- the hosted form. That's yet another channel where payments can be taken. And then we just simply group that into others.

Now, the nice thing about these is if you only wanted to focus-- or let's say you wanted to remove the hosted forms and others, the charts will then rework itself and show you that information. So just some little things there that will help you to kind of hone in on specific information that you're looking for.

Now, over here to the right, we're taking those same payments for that same time period, and now we're going to break them down by the payment type. So things like recurring payment, one-time payments, autopay payments, invoice payments, and then convenience fees are all available at a bird's eye view in this section of the reporting.

If we move down here, we can now begin to see for these payments for this time period how many were bank account, how many were credit card, and then how many were debit card. And then, again, if we move over to the right here, we can take and show all of those credit card payments and then show you the breakdown in terms of were they Mastercard, Visa, Discover, or American Express.

And then the last graph presented here starts to begin to show you payments by partner. So if you have an organizational hierarchy that maybe has a main parent and then maybe you have three or four lines of business, this will show you the payments for each of those lines of business. What you can do, then, from this section here is you can click on a specific partner, and you can begin to see all of the details as far as those payments. So, again, it will show you the value, the volume, the customer fees, and then it begins to show you each transaction that is included in these statistics here.

As you begin to display this, should it go longer than one screen, you can simply jump to the next page. You can jump to the last page, and you can just go back and forth like that. Now, you're going to notice that there are certain columns here that are listed-- the scheduled by, the confirmation number, the payment amount, payment type, partner name, process date, and scheduled date.

One of the things that you can do is you can go in and customize the fields that actually show up this screen here. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that we only have room for so many fields across. So as you go in to customize, you can do things like take the partner name out and then maybe move in another field, such as the funding account number. And if you wanted to move that up higher, you simply click on it and then just move it up into the list here.

Once you've done that, you can click Apply. And you'll notice now that that funding account number has been included. You can also do filters or apply filters. So if you wanted to look for a specific payment range, you could enter that information in. And then only the values that fall within that range would be available to you.

The other option that you have is to actually export this data. Some people like to utilize things like Excel to be able to do analysis or pivot tables or subtotal. So you can export this as a CSV file. You can export it as an Excel file, as a PDF, or as a complete CSV. And this will import the data.

Now, one thing to know is that when the export occurs, even though you're not seeing all of these fields due to restrictions with the amount of space available on the screen, all of the fields that are listed on this left side are downloaded so that you can view that information within an Excel spreadsheet, for example. So these are the most commonly used functions when it comes to reporting.

And again, as I mentioned earlier, every report will work exactly the same. The only difference would be the actual data. So with that in mind, what I want to do is just quickly go through the reports and a high-level overview of what they do. So we've talked about the payments processed. So these are payments that have actually been processed within the system. The payments by entry date will basically show you, for a specific date, the payments that were made.

And again, you've got your bar charts here. You've got all of your graphs, and then you have your data at the end of this that you can review. The payments returned, these are going to be NSH type of returns that come back for ACH payment. So we get data back from U.S. Bank that tells us of any payments that were processed through the system that had a non-sufficient fund. And so you can go in-- and people typically use this as part of their daily balancing process, is to go in and just review any payments that have been returned.

So, again, you've got your high-level overview here in terms of your numbers, graphs. And then you don't have as many of the bar charts here, but you do have some of that. And should you need to go in and look at the details associated with that, you can simply click there, and then the details of that information will be presented to you so that you can see specifically which transactions came back with the NSF.

The payments refunded-- so within the application, somebody within the customer service organization who has the authority to go in and actually refund payments can do so. And then there is a specific report that will show data associated with any refunds that were processed through the system.

The next report here, the processed unsuccessful, will give you an overview of your canceled payments, any declined payments, or any rejected payments. And then down below, you can see all of the data that was associated with any canceled data. You can click on the Declined Payments, and you can see data associated with declined payments. And then you can also click on Rejected Payments to view details there.

Again, you can export this data to something like Excel, and then you can utilize pivot tables or subtotals, filters to do additional data analysis. The payments pending report is just going to show you a list of all of the payments that are going to be coming up within the designated date. So it's almost used as sort of a forecasting tool, and it will begin to show you things about where they were initially taken, the types of payment. So these would be things like your future dated payments, which a customer or a biller may allow.

The next section here is your unsuccessful payments. So this would typically be things like someone set up maybe a recurring payment and then, for whatever reason, the payment was unsuccessful. So this is where a biller would go to view those types of payments.

You have a few reports here under Customer Reports that will basically show you data in terms of customer status, customer enrollments, and payment enrollments. So the customer status report is a very high-level overview of sort of the whole customers within that organization. So how many total customer records have we loaded into our application? How many are active? How many are new? Anything that we've had in terms of status changes. If there is any customers that have been suspended or revoked. All of that data, at a high level, is available there.

You also have, then, your graphs here. And then we do, then, break all of that down-- how many are active, how many are suspended, so on and so forth. And once again, the data is available for you to look at it. So if you wanted to see the status changes, you could click on that tab here, drill into it, and it will show you the specifics about those statuses, which just allows you to further drill in.

And then the other option here is to click on the total customer status. And then, once again, when that data arrives, it will allow you to specifically click on an individual account and drill further into the data. The customer enrollments-- so this is reflective of customers who have accessed the customer-facing online portal, have actually enrolled in the application.

So this will show you the total current active enrollments. It will show you the active enrollments as of a certain date. And then it will break it into new enrollments as well as customers who actually unenrolled from the customer-facing applications. And you'll have additional information regarding the graphs. And then if I want to drill into that data for online enrollments, then I have the ability to further drill down into those details.

The payment enrollment is strictly going to show you things like autopay, recurring pay, or payment plan. And again, depending upon a biller's setup, they may or may not have these. But should they decide to offer autopay, they can actually go in and see details about the customers who have enrolled in autopay. Or they can go in and look at customers who have enrolled in recurring pay and, once again, drill down into the specifics associated with that.

The next report section that I'm going to go into is the settlement reports. This basically allows you to go in and see, for a particular biller, how the payments are going to be settling at the end of the day. And it's more of a consolidated report. So it'll do things like break down any payment for that date, refunds, original payments, refunded payments. And then you have the ability, again, to drill into that, which then shows you the payments that were made through the web, things of that nature.

So it's more of a settlement. It's more of a summary report, which shows you all of the activity for a specific date range. And then you also have the ability to export that. I'm going to go into the intraday reports now. So one thing to keep in mind-- as payments are being made throughout the day, the only place that you'll be able to see them in terms of a reporting aspect is in the intraday payment. So as payments are happening throughout the day, a biller can come in here multiple times and see what is happening in terms of today's activity.

So it will show them the value, the volume, average value, customer fees, and then the breakout. And so as the day progresses, up until the cutoff time, these values will change throughout the day. Now, at the end of the day, when we run our end-of-day process, all of the data from the intraday reports is then wiped out, and that data becomes available in things like the payment reports.

So the next day, at the very early start of the day, if you come into these intraday reports, they may have zero. And then as payments progressed throughout the day, these values will continue to increase.

Now, another feature here in terms of card reports, we have something that's really very useful is a card expiration report. So for any credit cards or debit cards that are saved in the system, the system will keep track of the expiration dates. And it will show you, in terms of dates, what you can expect in terms of the number of cards that will be expiring.

So you can see here that we have September, August, July, and June. And then it begins to show you the breakdown by credit card or debit card. And again, if you take those cards, it breaks it out by Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Now, you can again drill down into the data to see specifically which accounts are going to have cards that are going to expire.

So you can use this as a report to be proactive and contact your customers, but note that we actually have an email notification that senses when a card is going to expire that's on file. And that email notification goes out to that customer letting them know that their card is about to expire and that it requires some sort of action on their part. So this is a nice tool that allows you to see that from an overview standpoint in terms of your card expirations.

I'm going to skip down to the notification reports. And what this is going to give you is an overview of the various notifications that the eBill system produces for a given date range. So you can see here that there were 714 emails that went out between June 8 and June 14. Here's the number SMS text messages. These were more like real-time updates. And then we lump everything else into others.

And then we begin to break these down again by email, web hooks, all of the different notifications and methods that are available for a given setup. And again, just like before, should we need to drill into specific data, you have the ability to click on that partner and then see the detail that's associated with that. This actually gets you into a specific mode, tells you the type of message, and then tells you whether that was successful or completed or failed.

So this is a good tool to look at if you really want to kind of check out your notifications and how many have gone out and perhaps maybe help you to make a decision about is email more successful or do we have better results with text messaging. We also have some audit reports available that really just talks about your customer activity and your payment activity. So if I take a look at just one of these, it will just show you the payment activity in terms of the users, the customers, and then the count, and just detail about auditing. I don't see too many people use these, unless there's an issue that comes up and you actually need to drill down in and take a closer look at that.

So these are really the most common used reports that we see, really the payment reports being the focus of the online reporting activity. And again, just to remind you, if you need more details on the reports, you can find that information in your eBill user guide. So I hope you found this information useful, and best of luck. Thanks. 

[MUSIC PLAYING]