Two different facts come back from a bank, and LEAT keeps them in
different places on purpose.
The debit is the line on the statement showing the total leaving
LEAT's account. One line, one number. It proves the right total left.
The delivery is the bank saying that a named beneficiary received a
named amount. One of these per person.
A batch of eighty payslips produces one debit and, if we are lucky,
eighty deliveries. The debit tells you nothing about which of the eighty
people got their money.
So a confirmed debit moves every payment on the batch to "delivery
unknown" — a real status, with a real queue — and never to paid.
The debit has to equal the frozen total exactly, on the same account, in
the same currency. No rounding.
If it does not, the whole batch stops and one exception opens. Not one
per person: one. Seventy-nine settlements and a guess is not a
reconciliation, and the guess is always the one that matters.
Some bank reports list every payment, successes and failures. Others list
only what went wrong.
A report that only lists failures can mark a payment as rejected. It can
never mark one as paid, and the people it does not mention stay "delivery
unknown" until a complete report, a statement line or a person resolves
them.
Reading "they were not on the failure list" as "they were paid" is the
single easiest way to report a payment that never arrived.
Whether a bank report lists everything or only failures is written down
in LEAT's configuration before the first file is imported, by the Chief
Accountant and the Treasury Lead.
It is not guessed from the file. A file that happens to list everybody
this week is not a promise about next week.
LEAT reconciles to QuickBooks and never replaces it. A payment is
"reconciled" when three things agree: what LEAT prepared, what the bank
reported, and what the accounts say. Two out of three is an exception
with somebody's name on it.
