Reconciliation

Reconciliation is the art of making sure what you think you earned is what you actually received. It's where finance meets reality — matching authorizations, captures, and settlements line by line until every cent has a home.

When done well, reconciliation keeps your accounting clean, your forecasts accurate, and your CFO calm. When ignored, it's how money quietly disappears into the cracks between systems.

Why Reconciliation Matters

Card payments travel through multiple hops — gateway, acquirer, network, issuer — each taking a fee, each rounding decimals differently. The amount you captured in your commerce platform is rarely identical to what lands in your bank account. Reconciliation connects those dots. A solid reconciliation process helps you:

• Verify that every captured transaction was funded — no missing payouts, no unprocessed batches.
• Detect delays or anomalies early — you'll notice if yesterday's volume hasn't settled or a region suddenly stops paying out.
• Account for deductions — chargebacks, fees, and rolling reserves rarely appear on invoices; they appear in payout statements.
• Maintain accurate cash-flow forecasts — because planning depends on when money actually arrives, not when it was earned.

How It Works

Most acquirers provide payout reports or APIs listing every transaction included in each deposit. A typical flow looks like this:

1. Capture in your system — the sale is marked "ready for settlement".
2. Payout confirmation — the acquirer sends a batch file or you retrieve data via API: transaction ID, date, amount, currency, and deductions.
3. Matching — you (or your software) match each settlement record with your original transaction.
4. Variance checks — flag anything where expected and actual amounts differ beyond tolerance thresholds
5. Accounting entry — once reconciled, amounts are booked as realized revenue.

The level of automation depends on your provider. Modern PSPs integrate directly with accounting tools and reconciliation dashboards. Others still send nightly CSV files that feel like they escaped from a 1998 fax machine.

When you're small, manual spreadsheets work. At enterprise scale — multiple acquirers, currencies, and regions — reconciliation becomes its own mini-discipline. Large merchants run dedicated tools or custom pipelines to normalize data and identify unmatched transactions automatically.