Reconciliation
Also known as: Payment reconciliation, Card reconciliation
Reconciliation is matching a merchant's recorded sales to the fees, refunds and payouts that reach the bank account. It is how the books prove that every card sale was paid, and for the right amount.
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Example
A shop's till shows €4,200 across three days. The bank shows one payout of €4,086. Reconciliation explains the €114: fees, one refund and a sale not yet paid.
Closing the till is easy. Proving the bank agrees with it is the job.
Reconciliation matches three records. What the merchant sold. What the acquirer charged and refunded. What actually arrived in the bank account. If those three tell the same story, the books are clean.
They rarely do on the first try. A payout bundles several days. It is paid net of fees. Refunds and disputes are deducted. Settlement works in daily net amounts that include transaction amounts and fees.
Each of those is one more line in the gap between the sales report and the bank statement.
Where the gap comes from. When the account that receives card payments is separate from the account where the business keeps its money, the data lives in two places. The payout statement sits in a provider's portal. The bank line sits in the bank. Someone has to carry numbers between them, by export, by hand or by integration. Every extra hop is a place for a mismatch.
That is the quiet cost of treating acceptance as a device. The terminal works. The reporting does not meet the books.
What good looks like. A payout that references the sales it covers. Fees shown as lines, not hidden in a net figure. Refunds and disputes visible on the same statement. And one place where the merchant can check all of it.
If reconciliation takes an evening every week, the problem is not the accountant.
