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
- 10
- Available on
- All plans
Reconciliation support streamlines the process of matching transactions with settlements and bank deposits. Automate complex reconciliation tasks, identify discrepancies quickly, and maintain financial integrity.
This reduces manual effort and improves financial oversight.
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
Reconciliation support serves as a critical bridge between the point of authorisation and the final transfer of funds to a merchant bank account. In a typical payment lifecycle, transactions processed via an acquirer are subject to various deductions, including interchange, scheme fees, and acquirer margins, before the net settlement is distributed.
Reconciliation involves the systematic comparison of internal sales records, processor settlement files, and bank statements to ensure every transaction is accounted for. This process identifies discrepancies arising from timing differences, currency fluctuations in cross-border trade, or unexpected chargeback debits.
By centralising data from multiple Merchant Identification Numbers (MIDs) and payment service providers, the system enables finance teams to verify that the expected value of captured transactions aligns with the actual funds received. This rigorous oversight is essential for maintaining accurate ledgers and meeting the financial reporting standards required by internal audits and tax authorities.
How reconciliation support works
Data ingestion and mapping
The system aggregates daily transaction reports from gateways and processors alongside settlement files from various acquirers. Standardised headers are applied to disparate data formats, ensuring that transaction IDs, authorisation codes, and timestamps are formatted consistently across the entire payment stack for accurate comparison.
Automated matching logic
Arithmetic algorithms compare authorisation records against settlement entries. The engine looks for exact matches across unique identifiers such as the Acquirer Reference Number (ARN). This process accounts for gross transaction values and deducts known costs like interchange fees or refunds to arrive at expected net settlement amounts.
Discrepancy identification and flagging
Items that do not meet matching criteria are isolated in an exception report. Common flags include transactions that were authorised but never captured, partial settlements, or deposits that do not correspond to any recorded sales activity. This allows staff to focus on investigating specific anomalies rather than manual scanning.
Bank statement verification
The final stage involves matching the total net payout indicated by the acquirer to the specific credit entries on the merchant bank statement. This step confirms that the funds have moved successfully through the banking system and are cleared, closing the lifecycle of the transaction.
Why reconciliation support matters
Verification of net settlement
Merchants often struggle to calculate the precise net amount expected after various fee structures are applied. Reconciliation support provides transparency into how gross sales are converted to net deposits by itemising interchange fees and scheme costs. This prevents revenue leakage where acquirer errors or unexplained fees might otherwise go unnoticed over long fiscal periods, ensuring the business receives the full value of its processed volume.
Enhanced audit and compliance
Financial institutions and tax regulators require precise record-keeping regarding money movement. Standardised reconciliation provides a clear audit trail from the initial customer checkout to the final bank deposit. By maintaining these records systematically, businesses can respond to retrieval requests or financial audits with documented evidence, reducing the risk of fines or unfavourable findings during statutory reporting or internal compliance reviews.
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.
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
- Automatic synchronisation of transaction data from multiple global acquirer portals and gateways.
- Granular mapping of Acquirer Reference Numbers to internal order IDs for precise tracking.
- Integrated calculation of interchange and scheme fees to predict net settlement values.
- Detection of individual transaction failures within a bulk settlement batch or payout.
- Real-time visibility into pending funds and expected payout dates for cash flow management.
- Categorisation of deductions including chargebacks, refunds, and rolling reserve withholdings.
- Exportable reports formatted for direct import into common enterprise resource planning software.
- Systematic flagging of duplicate payments or double-settlement errors for immediate remediation.
- Historical data archiving to facilitate multi-year financial audits and trend analysis.
- Validation of merchant bank deposits against processor payout notifications to confirm fund arrival.
A short scoping call, then a written plan for your MIDs.
Questions about Reconciliation support
What is the difference between transaction reconciliation and bank reconciliation?
Transaction reconciliation involves matching an order in your shopfront or ERP to an authorisation and capture event within your payment gateway or acquirer report.
Bank reconciliation is the subsequent step of matching the aggregated payout from the acquirer to the actual credit entry in your business bank account.
The former ensures you have been paid for specific orders, while the latter ensures the processor has transferred the consolidated funds as promised. Effective systems bridge both processes to provide a complete view of the cash cycle.
How does reconciliation handle fees like interchange and scheme fees?
A robust reconciliation system isolates the gross transaction amount from the net settlement. It does this by ingesting fee data from the acquirer settlement file, which typically breaks down costs into interchange-plus or blended categories.
By attributing these fees to specific transactions or batches, the system helps merchants understand the true cost of acceptance. This granularity is vital for identifying if an acquirer is applying the correct MCC-based rates or if there are unexpected spikes in scheme costs.
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.
Can reconciliation support help in identifying friendly fraud or chargebacks?
Yes, by matching settlement files against transaction records, the system can automatically identify when a deduction has occurred due to a chargeback or a retrieval request.
If a transaction was successfully captured but the funds are absent from the settlement report, the system looks for a corresponding dispute notification.
This allows merchants to quickly initiate the representment process and ensures that the financial impact of disputes is immediately visible in reporting, rather than being buried in aggregate totals.
What happens when a merchant uses multiple currencies for settlement?
Multi-currency reconciliation requires the system to track the exchange rate at the time of authorisation versus the rate used at the time of settlement.
The software calculates the FX gain or loss and accounts for any currency conversion fees applied by the acquirer or the network.
This ensures that the merchant can balance their books in their primary reporting currency while maintaining visibility into the original foreign currency value of the sale.
Does this replace the need for an ERP or accounting software?
No, reconciliation support is designed to complement ERP systems like NetSuite, SAP, or Sage. While an ERP serves as the general ledger for the entire business, the reconciliation tool handles the complex, high-volume data specific to the payments industry.
It processes the raw, often messy data from payment providers and turns it into clean, reconciled entries that can be exported or pushed via API into the accounting software, reducing the burden on finance teams.
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.