E-commerce businesses today are more efficient than ever before. Through diverse sales channels and marketplaces, it is possible to target many customer groups. They can offer their customers a seamless and convenient shopping experience with user-friendly interfaces and easy payment options. Customers' payment preferences in today's technological change are constantly changing. Therefore, businesses need to flexibly adapt to them.
However, with the sale of goods via sales channels such as Amazon, eBay and Co. comes a large accounting workload, as invoice generation and payment reconciliation across different marketplaces becomes even more complex. To put an end to the complex accounting challenges, it is worthwhile to connect to the PayJoe software solution. A positive effect of this is the resource savings of costs and time.
What is PayJoe?
Payjoe provides us with the perfect interface between payment provider and accounting system to realize the goal of fully automated accounting. E-commerce today is conducted through numerous sales platforms. This is also accompanied by a large number of payment flows that need to be processed. In most cases, the data of the marketplaces is summarized as collective items and must therefore be prepared individually. This is the only way to ensure proper accounting.
This is where PayJoe comes into play, because individual transactions are now created from the collective amounts and supplemented with the necessary billing information. Incoming payments, refunds, charges and disbursement amounts can thus be easily and automatically transferred to our accounting software. This reduces the previous, large accounting workload. We will explain in more detail in this blog post how exactly this is implemented with PayJoe and why an Odoo connection is an unbeatable combination.
A payment reconciliation without PayJoe
So far, payment reconciliation without PayJoe has proven to be a big time-waster, as the multitude of online orders across different e-commerce platforms has made record-keeping even more challenging.
Marketplace transactions can be a major challenge for today's e-commerce businesses: Payment methods and incoming payments vary for each customer, and accounting must reconcile and properly enter payment cycles and movements into the accounting system. In multichannel commerce, sales take place across multiple marketplaces in addition to the online store. The challenge is to always maintain a closed invoice number cycle in order to close the accounting without errors.
When posting payments via Amazon, Klarna, etc., online retailers face the problem that the data from the payment providers cannot simply be read into the accounting system in individual transactions. In most cases, the payment data is also posted manually, so that each item must be processed individually. In accounting, a posting is thus created manually for each payment type and incoming payments from the payment providers are assigned to the outgoing invoices. This often results in incorrect data and reconciliations. Payments from the various marketplaces cannot be automatically assigned to the documents. The reason for this is that the document number from the accounting department is not included in the payment transactions and a unique payment information has not been integrated into the open items of the accounting department.
How does PayJoe solve this problem?
At this point PayJoe supports us. The collective debit entries can be converted into individual transactions. They are enriched with the missing document information and then made available for accounting. The PayJoe tool can thus assign and post hundreds of individual items with just one click. It is also advantageous here that our existing systems of payment providers and the accounting software can still be used.
An automated open item reconciliation can take place via the now identical invoice numbers. The retrieval of payment data from PayJoe can take place in various formats via a CSV file, in DATEV or MT940 format and also as a retrieval via HBCI.
Accounting in Odoo can now be made even more efficient. For this, it is worthwhile to connect PayJoe to the existing Odoo system.
PayJoe integration in Odoo
To connect PayJoe to Odoo, we use that PayJoe implements the German FinTS standard. This enables the retrieval of bank data via the Internet. While Odoo does not support FinTS by itself, there is an architecture for connecting banks for automatic account queries. This could be extended by FinTS. The implementation of the FinTS standard is already prefabricated in the FinTS module for Python. This module implements the outdated FinTS 3.0 standard, instead of the new FinTS 4.0 standard. In order to use negative values and balances of 0, an additional clause is used, which converts these manually into floating point numbers.
This makes an Odoo connection with PayJoe straightforward: We select the menu item "New FinTS bank connection" in the finance module.
Instead of "Add a bank", we enter our credentials and upon successful login, we are redirected to Odoo journals for a normal account mapping.
PayJoe has the option in each account to customize the transferred data. We need this to assign a unique identifying number for each transaction. This way, the existing bookings can be taken into account. In our PayJoe interface, we now find 4 lines for different uses. In order to avoid that all payment purposes are transferred into the same data field during the transfer, we make some adjustments:
We enter the payment ID in the field "Sender name". We enter the other required information such as "Payment Order ID", "Payment Memo" and "Payment Type" separated by a "/" in the "Purpose 1" line. In the next step, if necessary, we deactivate the balance logic, which is normally used in Odoo for automatic bank connections. The reason for this is that we want to keep the balances properly. Some connections represent a balance by adding up all transactions from the time of the connection. Others, however, return "0.00" in response to a balance query. In the last step, PayJoe gives an IBAN of "1234567890" for charges, but we discard this so that the automatic reconciliation is successfully implemented.
Then to match our incoming payments, invoices and account data in Odoo with the data received from PayJoe, we use the automatic reconciliation of the Odoo standard. Thus, we have successfully connected PayJoe to the existing Odoo system and can now use the PayJoe tool for fully automated accounting.
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