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Standing Order matching 

Zenya Allen
Zenya Allen
  • Updated

This article includes: 

Invoice type

For the Standing Order to match - three conditions must be met:

  • There must be a Standing Order invoice type, ready to receipt on the Receipt screen
  • There must be a valid Standing Order reference to match to on the import file and in CFPwinMan 
  • The amount of the receipt must match the value of the outstanding invoice

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Import file: Description field

  • When performing a Standing Order import, CFPwinMan is trying to match the Standing Order Reference, as entered on your Tenant or Tenancy screen, with the Description field in the file exported from your banking platform
  • It will then allocate monies against any appropriate outstanding invoices for that Tenant or Tenancy
  • If there is any ambiguity whatsoever, no match will take place i.e. the system is design to fail-safe - so that there is no possibility of allocating monies incorrectly

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Standing Order Reference – using the Tenant code

  • The recommended item to use in matching is the Tenant code. This is because each Tenant has a code that is unique to them, so once set up, the Standing Order module will perform very well
  • You should ask your Tenants to use their Tenant codes as their Reference
  • Tenants do not need to include percentage signs, however you may need to ask them to use brackets; see the sections below

My customers already include the property address - why can't I use this?

  • If you are new to the Standing Order module and many of your Tenants are already supplying the property address for their Standing Order payments, using the property address will get the vast majority of your imports matching correctly.
    However it is not recommended as a permanent solution, because depending on where the address appears in the import file Description, you will introduce ambiguity and stop matching
  • If the address is right at the start of the Description you may get away with it, if not, use of wildcards will be necessary so that a reference of %2 Station Road% will be found in 2 Station Road, 12 Station Road, 22 Station Road, 32 Station Road, 102 Station Road, etc

Wildcards and the % character

What are wildcards and why do we need them?

  • Wildcards are characters that are used to represent any other character
  • In Microsoft SQL, the database engine upon which CFPwinMan SDB is built (SDB meaning SQL DataBase) the wildcard character is the percentage sign %
  • We need to use wildcards because the Standing Order module is attempting to find a match in the Description field in the SO export/import file and we often cannot use the exact set of characters in the file because banks change what is included in this description
  • Some banks change it for each payment, others simply from time to time, in each instance however when this happens, if the whole description was being matched, the import would fail

Ambiguity and bracketing with { and }

  • Depending on the format of your Tenant codes, you may have ambiguity.
    If you have not altered Tenant codes yourself, you are unlikely to have any issues
  • Our conventional T1001, T1002, T1003 will work until you have over nine thousand Tenants and the code becomes T10010 which is suitable for most agents.
    However, if you have the Tenant codes T1, T2, T3, T4, etc, etc..then these codes will be present in most other codes on the system i.e. there is ambiguity.
    In this instance you will need to take an extra step to bracket, or frame the codes and remove this ambiguity

E.g. Your codes are in the format of: T1001, T1002, T1003..

  • Ask your Tenants to use their TCode with no additional characters
  • In the file description, somewhere the characters T1001 will be present
  • On their Tenant/Tenancy record, enter their SO Ref as %T1001%. This will then find T1001 somewhere in the description on their payment record, irrespective of where in the description it appears. It will match correctly

E.g. Your codes are in the format of: T1, T2, T3...T10, T11, T12..

  • Ask your Tenants to use their TCode with brackets around it
  • The brackets we suggest are { and } as they seem to be accepted by most banks
  • In the file description, somewhere the characters {T1} will be present
  • On their Tenant/Tenancy record, enter their SO Ref as %{T1}%. This will then find {T1} somewhere in the description on their payment record and match correctly
    This works because {T1} does not exist in {T10} - because the search is also looking for the brackets in the correct place
  • T1 does exists in T10, so if brackets weren't used, the T1 record would match against T1, T10, and also T11, T12, T13, etc, etc. If they also exist because it matches against multiple entries in the file, the system does not know the correct place to assign the payment and therefore fails safe doing nothing i.e. no match occurs at all

Related articles:

Standing Order module