Payment reconciliation, treasury and FX
Match every settlement to the transactions inside it, with fees broken out line by line — so closing the books does not start with a spreadsheet.
Payment reconciliation is the process of matching the money that arrives in your bank account against the individual transactions that produced it, accounting for processing fees, refunds, chargebacks and currency conversion along the way. It is what turns a single settlement deposit back into a list of payments your finance team can account for.
Why this is hard with more than one provider
A settlement lands as one net figure. Inside it are hundreds or thousands of payments, minus refunds, minus fees charged at different rates, minus chargebacks raised against transactions from weeks earlier, possibly converted from another currency at a rate nobody recorded at the time. Every provider reports this differently, on its own schedule, in its own file format.
With one provider that is tedious. With four it becomes a monthly project — and the usual result is that fees stop being checked, because checking them costs more than the errors they would catch.
What a reconciled payment carries
- The settlement batch it arrived in, and the date the money actually moved.
- Gross amount, each fee component separately, and the net figure.
- The route the payment took and the provider that processed it.
- FX rate applied, if the payment settled in a different currency from capture.
- Refunds and chargebacks linked back to the original transaction, not floating as separate line items.
- A single identifier chain that runs from checkout through authorisation, capture, settlement and payout.
Multi-currency without the guesswork
Accepting in a customer's currency and settling in yours introduces a conversion, and the rate applied is frequently discovered after the fact. Holding balances in multiple currencies and converting deliberately is usually cheaper than converting every transaction on arrival — but only if you can see what each conversion actually cost.
Balances are held per currency, conversions are recorded with the rate and the moment they happened, and the cost of each is attributable to the transactions behind it.
Getting it into your accounting system
Reconciliation that lives only in a payments dashboard has not finished the job. Settlement data exports as CSV or JSON, or can be pushed via API into your ledger on the schedule your close runs on, with the identifier chain intact so an entry can always be traced back to a payment.
Common questions
What is payment reconciliation?
Payment reconciliation is matching the money that lands in your bank account against the individual transactions that produced it — accounting for fees, refunds, chargebacks and currency conversion — so that a single settlement deposit can be broken back down into the payments it contains.
Why is reconciling payments across multiple providers difficult?
Each provider settles on its own schedule, reports in its own format, and charges fees with a different structure. A settlement is a net figure covering many payments minus refunds, fees and chargebacks that may relate to transactions from a different period, so the mapping back to individual payments is rarely one to one.
What does same-day settlement visibility mean?
It means the settlement and its breakdown appear the day the money moves, rather than in a report issued days later. The funds still arrive on your provider's settlement schedule — what changes is when you can see and account for them.
Can reconciliation data go into our accounting system?
Yes. Settlement data exports as CSV or JSON, or can be pushed by API into your ledger, with the identifier chain preserved so any accounting entry can be traced back to the originating payment.
How is FX handled on cross-currency payments?
Balances are held per currency, and conversions are recorded with the rate and timestamp applied, attributable to the underlying transactions. That makes the cost of converting visible, and lets you convert deliberately rather than automatically on every transaction.
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