Reporting & Data
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Last editedMay 20261 min read
Real-time visibility into your payment data is essential for effective financial management, reporting, and operational oversight. This section covers the dashboards, reporting tools, data export capabilities, reconciliation support, and API data access you should expect from a payments provider.
| # | Question | Explanation / what to look for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Do you provide a centralised portal that gives a complete view of payment activity, mandate status, settlement, and customer data in one place? | Fragmented data across multiple screens or reports forces manual consolidation. A single view for all payment operations significantly reduces the time your finance and operations teams spend on data gathering. |
| 2 | Does your platform include real-time Management Information dashboards with configurable views by business unit, geography, or payment scheme? | Configurable dashboards allow different stakeholders (finance, operations, executive) to see the metrics most relevant to them without relying on a central team to run reports. |
| 3 | Can your platform provide real-time alerts or notifications for exceptions such as failed payments, failed submissions, or settlement delays? | Proactive exception alerting allows your team to act immediately rather than discovering problems during end-of-day reconciliation. Ask whether alerts are configurable by threshold and by recipient. |
| 4 | Do you offer a comprehensive range of standard reports, and how can we customise them to match our specific reporting requirements? | Standard reports cover most common needs, but customisation matters: your internal reporting structures, fiscal periods, or regional breakdowns may not match the defaults. Understand what can be changed and what is fixed. |
| 5 | Are we able to run ad hoc reports based on specific transaction volumes, date ranges, payment schemes, or customer segments? | Ad hoc reporting is essential for one-off analysis, eg. investigating a spike in failures, reconciling a specific period, or answering an auditor’s query. Ask whether this requires a support ticket or can be done self-service. |
| 6 | Can transactional data and reports be exported in standard formats such as CSV, Excel, or XML, on a scheduled or on-demand basis? | Data portability matters for integration with your own finance systems and for regulatory record-keeping. Scheduled exports reduce manual effort; on-demand exports support ad hoc analysis. |
| 7 | Can reporting data be accessed programmatically via API, enabling automated ingestion into our internal systems? | API access to reporting data is the most scalable approach for high-volume operations. Understand the data latency (real-time vs. batched), the API structure, and any rate limits that apply to data export endpoints. |
| 8 | Does your platform support direct data connections to our data warehouse or BI tools (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery, Power BI, Tableau)? | Ask what pre-existing integrations exist, or how complex it would be to build your own. What support will you have in doing this? |
| 9 | Does your system support automated daily reconciliation, with reports that match collected payments to settlements and identify any discrepancies? | Automated reconciliation is the difference between a finance team that closes month-end smoothly and one that spends days hunting for discrepancies. |
| 10 | Is your solution able to automatically generate and carry a unique payment reference through the full collection and settlement lifecycle? | End-to-end reference tracking is essential for reconciliation: you need to trace a collected payment back to the original mandate, invoice, and customer without manual intervention. |
| 11 | Does your solution allow us to attach custom metadata to transactions (e.g., our own invoice reference or customer ID) that is then available in reporting and data exports? | Custom metadata allows you to link payment events to your own data structures without building a separate lookup layer. This is particularly valuable when integrating with ERP or billing systems. |
| 12 | Can you provide full traceability and a complete audit trail from the initial source of a payment instruction through to final settlement? | A complete audit trail can be required for regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, and internal audit. Understand whether the audit trail is available in the UI, via API, or only on request. |
Sample RFP
Our sample RFP includes all of the questions in this guide and more. You can download it and use it as a template for creating your own.
Note: The questions suggested on this page are intended as a starting place for writing your own RFP. They're provided for general information only: they're not intended to be prescriptive or to provide legal advice. We suggest working closely with your management to develop an RFP that is tailored towards the specific requirements of your business.
