Where is payment information stored in Slate?

Information on payment transactions is stored in two places.

• First, activities or interactions on the person or application record are used to indicate when an applicant owes a payment, when a payment is waived, and when a payment has been received or refunded. These activities represent the state of the applicant's "account", and Slate will add them up appropriately to determine what is owed. Payment received activities will show the history of payments accepted, either through Slate or (in the case of manually added Payment Received activities) elsewhere.

• Second, for payments made online through Slate, we store a log called Payment History. This history can be viewed either on the Payment History page, or by creating a query using the Payment query base. This history will include only transactions made online through Slate (using any payment processor), and will show payments that were received and (for certain payment providers) payments that were rejected. If you are using our built-in Slate Payments product, the payment history will also include refunded and disputed payment transactions.

Which type of data do I want to look at?

If you are interested in data stored as a result of online payments coming through Slate (either using our built-in Slate Payments tool or using an integration with an outside payment processor), then you'll want to look at payment history. Payment history can often (depending on the processor) give additional information, such as whether the payment was a credit card or bank account charge. Payment history also allows you to break the data out more easily; for example, the transaction number is typically part of a comment on a payment received activity, but in the payment history, the transaction number is a separate data point. If using our built-in Slate Payments product, the payment history has even more detail, such as fees, net received amount, abbreviated account number, etc.

If you are primarily interested in the state of an applicant's account, or if you want to know about payment received both online through Slate and otherwise (e.g. who owes money right now, who has recently completed their deposit, how many deposits have you received including paper checks or other external payments), then you'll want to look at the payment activities on the applicant record. This may include information that was entered manually.

How can I see the payment history for a specific individual?

When viewing a payment received activity on someone's record, you will also see a link to "View Payment History Details". If you click that, there will also be a link to view all payment history for this individual. You can also go to the Payment History page and search for an individual record. Note that you will see both person-scoped and application-scoped transactions for the selected person.

Drilling into the payment history for a particular transaction will give you access to the transaction details for a particular transaction (for most payment processors).

Clicking "Show" will display a dump of whatever information we received from the payment processor. This can be useful in troubleshooting or (for Slate Payment in particular) obtaining additional information about why a payment was declined, for example.

How can I query on payment history for multiple individuals?

You can see the history easily by visiting the Payment History page, available from your Database page. This will show the full payment history and can be filtered in a variety of ways, and can be exported as an Excel spreadsheet.

You can also create a custom query based on the payment history, which will include the same data but will give you more opportunity to customize.

1. In the Slate Template Library, add the Payment query base, and add the exports and filters with a category of Payments.

2. Build a query using the Payments population. For payment-related data, you should use the exports and filters that are available at the top of the export/filter selections:

   Details	Settlement	Slate Payments
   Payment Account Payment Amount Net Amount Date Fee Added Fee Action Scope	Settlement Date Settlement Status Settlement Bank Settlement Bank Account Last 4 Settlement Currency Settlement Amount Settlement Test Payment	Slate Payments - Publicly Displ... Slate payments - Name to sho... Slate Payments - Memo

These will be the exports and filters related directly to the payment history.

Because the Payment query base is linked to the Prospect and Applicant bases, you will also have access to prospect and applicant data. This can be useful, for example, if you want to export the intended program, or application round, along with each transaction. However, the  payment-related exports and filters that are on the prospect and applicant bases (such as "Most Recent Payment Details") should not be used in a Payment History query. They are based on application activities (see below on how to query those).

How do I view test payments?

If you are using our built-in Slate Payments product, you'll have the ability to make payments in test mode (without using real money). Those payments will show in your Payment History, but by default, the Payment query base will filter them out (so that they don't throw off your reconciliation). If you need to query on test payments, you can edit the Payment query base and remove that filter:

• Where Clause - (pay.[test] = 0)

When you move to production, we recommend editing the Payment query base to restore the Where Clause .

How can I see payment activities for a specific individual?

Application-scoped payment activities will be under Activities on the application record. Person-scoped payment interactions will be in the interactions tab of the Timeline on the person record. Naturally, you can also view activities for an individual by querying as described below and filtering your query by person.

How can I query on payment activities for multiple individuals?

In a query using the Prospect or Application base, you can use exports and filters to 1) only include prospects or applicants who have a particular kind of payment activity on their record, and 2) show information about those payment activities. 

The Slate Template Library includes a number of exports and filters designed to give access to payment information. For example, there is an export block called Most Recent Payment Details that gives both payment due and payment received data for a given applicant. There are also a number of filters that allow you to, for example, select only applicants who have a payment due in a particular account, or only applicants that have made a payment in a given account. There are two filterable exports called Payment by Payment Account (Application-Scoped) and Payment by Payment Account (Person-Scoped) that allow you to filter based on payment activity in a payment account that you select.

How can I see information about the transfers I've received into my bank account?

If you are using the built-in Slate Payments product, then you will receive periodic transfers (on your selected schedule) of funds into your bank account. When we get an update that a transfer has occurred, we update each of the related transactions to link them to that transfer. There are two ways to see information about the transfers and about which transactions went into them.

First, on the Payment History page, in the upper right corner, there's a link to Transfers/Settlements. This will take you to a chronological list of transfers that you've received, each of which can be clicked on for additional information. When you pop up the details for a particular transfer, you'll see a link marked View payments in this transfer. Clicking that link will open a new window showing the Payment History with a filter added to only show transactions linked to that specific transfer.

Second, when creating a Payment query, you will see exports and filters related to settlements. Each transaction will be linked to the transfer/settlement that ultimately was affected by that transaction. Note that the settlement details are details about the entire settlement. So, if you have a row in your payment query results that shows an amount of $50 and a settlement amount of $1750, that means that this particular transaction was for $50, and it was included in a settlement that totalled $1750. The settlement total is included (along with the settlement date) as a way of identifying which settlement each transaction went into.