Handling failed payments

Part of managing a dividend payment is dealing with payments for investors which are Retained or Returned. The status of a payment can be changed automatically by the system, or manually by you when you receive information about the result of a payment attempt from your bank.

There are a variety of reasons a payment to an investor may be Retained or Returned.

Direct Credit Payments

A direct credit payment will be Retained:

• If an investor has either malformed or no bank details in the system on Payment date and your payment has been set up to disallow cheques their payment will automatically be set to Retained.
• When a payment is attempted by your bank and fails. You can change the payee’s status of the payment to Payment retained - wrong bank details.
  • This will trigger an email to the investor informing them that their bank details are incorrect. The email will provide a link for the investor to update their details so the payment can be reissued.
  • You have the option to delete the investor’s bank details when changing the status. To update an investor’s bank details on their behalf, you can edit the investor’s details.
• If a payment cannot be made to the investor, you can record this for the purpose of tracking unclaimed payments by changing the payee’s status of the payment to Paid - unclaimed monies. The amount will be counted in the Paid total of the payment.

To reprocess failed direct credit payments:

1. Once the bank details have been updated for an investor whose direct credit payment has failed (either by you or by the investor themselves), the Payment list view will show a green Updated details label in the Status column. Click the payment date or ID to go to the payment detail view and, in the Calculated payment amounts section, click on Direct Credit to view the Direct Credit list of payees. Once in the Direct Credit list you can see the investor’s status has been updated to Pending.
2. Go back to the payment details and click on Download .aba file to download a new ABA file containing only the payments to retry, and then upload the ABA file to your bank.
3. Once you have confirmed ABA file upload, click on the blue number next to Direct credit to go to the Direct credit detail view. You can see the payment status for the retained payments has been changed to Paid.
4. You can now return to the Payment details page, and in the Payment statements section under Direct Credit and DRP payments, the new statements will be available to send. click Send statements to generate the emails and pdfs (if required).

Cheque Payments

A cheque payment will be Returned if:

• an investor's address details are incorrect. In this case the status for the payment can be changed to:
  • Payment retained - wrong address details, or
  • Payment retained - cheque was returned to sender.
• To update an investor’s address details on their behalf, you can edit the investor’s details.

To reprocess failed cheque payments:

1. Go to the Payment details view.
2. In the Calculated payment amounts section, click on Cheques to view the Cheque list of payees.
3. In the Status column next to the investor’s name, select Payment retained - cheque was returned to sender or Payment retailed - wrong address details from the dropdown menu.
4. Once the address details have been updated for an investor whose cheque payment has failed (either by you or by the investor themselves), the Payments list view will show a green Updated details label in the Status column. Click the payment date or ID to go to the payment detail view and in the Calculated payment amounts section, click on Cheques to view the Cheque list of payees. Once in the Cheque list you can see the payee’s status has been updated to Pending.
5. You can now edit the Cheque number if needed. Return to the Payment details view to download a new statement to post to the investor. In the Payment statements section, click Download statements and mark as sent.
6. Once the payee has presented the cheque, in the Cheque list, set the status to Presented.

Retained payments report

You can export a CSV report containing investor and payment details for all retained payments.

1. From the menu go to Payments > Payments list view and from the Export dropdown menu, select Export retained payments to CSV.
2. The report will be generated as a background task and will be available in the Task queue and the All reports list view when complete. From the menu, go to Reports > All reports. From the reports list, click on the report description to go to the report detail page and download the CSV file.

Additional Information

To confirm which individual investor updated their bank details or address, on the Payment details page the Calculated payment amounts table displays the number of investors with updated details in the No. alerts column for payments to be made via Direct credit or Cheques. Click the Payment method link to bring up the list of investors. Those investors who have updated their bank details or address will show a status of Pending.