Reconciliation support
Reconciliation support functions as payment reconciliation software that automatically matches multi-acquirer transaction data with internal sales orders and ERP systems. Finance teams gain exact ledger balancing across currencies, extracting fee components and isolating discrepancies without manual spreadsheet comparisons.
- Category
- Reporting
- Capabilities
- 6
- Available on
- All plans
Financial controllers managing multiple processing partners face significant challenges when aligning gateway transaction records with internal sales orders. Complex order to cash reconciliation requires matching thousands of individual purchases against disjointed acquirer reports, often resulting in unassigned funds, missing data or obscured fee deductions across multiple currencies and international entities.
Cardflo provides automated payment reconciliation tools that extract data from our acquirer partners and match Acquirer Reference Numbers directly against merchant ERP records. The platform extracts exact interchange and scheme fees per transaction, flags discrepancies immediately and structures the outputs for direct ingestion into enterprise accounting systems.
Cardflo's reconciliation feature matches processed transactions against acquirer settlement files, ensuring financial accuracy across fragmented processing setups. This ensures full financial integrity and simplifies audit preparations for all supported merchants.
Reconciliation support overview
Balancing ledgers across a global setup requires exact parity between merchant order systems, gateway logs and acquirer processing statements. Cardflo delivers a reconciliation engine that matches specific transaction identifiers against enterprise resource planning tools, automating the comparison of sales receipts to actual processed volumes.
The system strips away the complexity of varied acquirer reporting formats by standardising data and isolating individual transaction fees, chargeback deductions and currency conversion costs. By focusing strictly on matching processed sales to internal orders, rather than visualising broader payment analytics or forecasting settlement reporting timelines, finance departments can eliminate manual ledger entries.
The orchestration layer extracts matching criteria directly from the payment payload, allowing accounting teams to flag unrecognised transactions and reconcile multi-currency sales volumes at a granular, per-transaction level.
How reconciliation support works
Standardising disparate acquirer data
The orchestration platform ingests transaction reports from multiple acquirer partners and normalises the data into a single uniform format. It extracts key variables such as processing currency, merchant category codes and transaction identifiers, removing the need for finance teams to parse different file types or proprietary reporting structures manually. This creates a clean foundational dataset for subsequent matching.
Matching against enterprise systems
The system cross-references the normalised acquirer records with internal sales data imported from the merchant enterprise resource planning platform. Using exact order IDs, customer reference numbers or custom metadata passed during the initial gateway request, the engine links each processed payment directly to its originating sales invoice. This establishes a definitive relationship between technical transactions and commercial records.
Isolating fees and discrepancies
Once the primary matching process completes, the engine separates gross processing volumes from deducted interchange fees, scheme costs and chargeback debits. Any transaction that fails to align with an internal order, or displays a value mismatch, generates a specific exception alert. Finance teams receive a structured export containing only these discrepancies, allowing focused investigation rather than line-by-line manual reviews.
Why reconciliation support matters
Reducing manual accounting overhead
Relying on spreadsheet comparisons to match global sales data against acquirer statements consumes hundreds of hours of administrative time. By automating the extraction and pairing of order IDs, financial controllers eliminate the operational burden of manual ledger balancing. This reduces staffing requirements for routine data entry and allows accounting departments to focus entirely on investigating genuine financial anomalies.
Preventing unallocated revenue
Payments processed without a corresponding internal sales record create compliance risks and obscure true revenue figures. Automated matching ensures that every processed transaction links directly to a commercial invoice, capturing split payments, partial refunds and multi-currency variations. This precision prevents funds from sitting in suspense accounts and maintains the integrity of the merchant balance sheet for audit purposes.
Regulatory notes for reconciliation support
Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance support
Publicly traded merchants must maintain strict internal controls over financial reporting to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley Act requirements. Manual spreadsheet reconciliation introduces human error and lacks the necessary audit trails required for compliance.
Automated matching systems provide verifiable, immutable logs linking every processed payment directly to an underlying commercial transaction.
By systematically flagging unmatched payments and extracting exact fee components via application programming interfaces, merchants establish a highly controlled revenue recognition process. This automation satisfies external auditors by proving that the recorded sales figures match the technical transaction logs provided by regulated acquirer partners exactly.
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard scoping
Finance teams handling raw acquirer reports often encounter full primary account numbers or sensitive cardholder data, which brings their accounting environments into the scope of Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard compliance.
Relying on network tokens and truncated identifiers during the matching process mitigates this risk.
Cardflo ensures that reconciliation exports contain only safe metadata, such as transaction IDs, order references and the last four digits of the payment instrument.
This allows financial controllers to balance ledgers and investigate discrepancies within their enterprise resource planning systems without expanding the corporate compliance footprint.
Reconciliation support use cases
ERP order ID matching
Finance teams must reconcile gateway transactions and acquirer records with ERP sales orders when references, captures and refunds appear in separate files. Cardflo standardises source data, preserves order IDs and matches payment events to ledger entries, while flagging missing, duplicated or partially matched records for investigation.
Blended fee extraction
Accountants receiving acquirer statements must separate interchange, scheme fees, gateway charges and other deductions from gross card proceeds before posting them to the general ledger. Cardflo and its acquirer partners provide structured reporting that extracts fee components and maps them to appropriate accounts, MIDs and transaction batches.
Reconciling airline ticket orders
Merchants accepting one transaction currency and accounting in another must reconcile gross sales, refunds, fees and converted net amounts without obscuring foreign exchange differences. Cardflo consolidates gateway and acquirer data by currency, MID and order reference, enabling finance teams to post balanced entries and isolate conversion discrepancies.
Partial capture discrepancy review
Retailers using partial captures and split fulfilment can find that one sales order produces several payment records, refunds or unmatched residual balances. Cardflo links each capture and refund to the original order ID, groups related acquirer entries and flags differences between ordered, captured and credited amounts for finance review.
Reconciliation support by the numbers
This is a typical industry range for finance teams transitioning from spreadsheet-based matching to automated acquirer data ingestion and algorithmic comparison.
Professional reconciliation systems aim for this level of precision by using unique identifiers like ARNs, though small variances may remain due to mid-month FX adjustments.
Most modern reporting interfaces can surface settlement data within a day of the file being generated by the acquirer, depending on the provider's reporting lag.
Methodology: these figures are illustrative ranges drawn from published industry data and observed merchant cohorts, not guarantees. Actual results depend on your risk profile, card mix, geography and acquiring setup, and are confirmed only in your own pricing and approval terms.
Related terms
Talk to our team about a live rollout across our acquirer partners' rails.
What you get with Reconciliation support
- Automated extraction of interchange, scheme and markup fees for precise per-transaction ledger entry generation.
- Direct ERP payment matching connecting gateway order identifiers with corresponding sales records in accounting software.
- Standardised multi-acquirer reconciliation that unifies disparate processing reports into a single, parseable financial data feed.
- Identification of mismatched transaction values and missing reference numbers across complex international corporate structures.
- Automatic currency conversion alignment to balance native processing currencies against the merchant base accounting currency.
- Separation of refund deductions and chargeback adjustments from gross sales to maintain accurate net ledgers.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Reconciliation support
How does the system match transactions when order numbers differ across acquirers?
Cardflo preserves custom metadata, such as internal order IDs or customer reference numbers, within the original payment payload sent through the gateway.
When our acquirer partners return their processing files, the orchestration layer cross-references this preserved metadata rather than relying solely on the Acquirer Reference Number.
If an acquirer strips custom fields during processing, the engine maps the transaction back using a combination of the gateway transaction ID, timestamp, currency and exact gross amount to re-establish the link to the internal enterprise resource planning record.
Can the platform isolate interchange and scheme fees from the gross processing volume?
The reconciliation engine processes detailed acquirer statements to extract the exact breakdown of charges applied to every transaction. By parsing interchange++ pricing models, the software separates the gross sale amount from the network scheme fee, the issuer interchange fee and the acquirer markup.
This granular extraction allows financial controllers to post gross revenue, cost of sales and processing expenses to distinct nominal codes within their accounting software, ensuring that the net ledger perfectly reflects the actual processed totals.
How does payment reconciliation software post matched data into ERP ledgers?
Matched transaction records can be delivered through scheduled files or an API using field mappings aligned with the merchant’s ERP and chart of accounts. The output can include order IDs, gateway references, acquirer references, currencies, gross amounts, extracted fees and net values.
Finance teams can configure posting rules for entities, ledger accounts and cost centres, while unmatched or incomplete records remain flagged for review rather than being posted automatically.
How are chargebacks and refunds handled during order to cash reconciliation?
When a refund or chargeback occurs, the acquirer partner adjusts the processing volume, often days or weeks after the original sale.
The system captures these asynchronous debit entries from the acquirer report and automatically traces the related reference number back to the original ERP sales record.
The export then flags the deduction as an adjustment against the initial invoice, categorising dispute fees separately from the refunded principal. This ensures that the finance team can balance historical sales ledgers against delayed negative adjustments accurately.
Related guides.
See how Cardflo compares.
Ready to improve your payments setup?
Tell us about your business. We'll match you with the right acquiring partners and the right route, typically inside a week.