Everything You Need to Know About Payment Gateway Reconciliation (2024)

Payment gateway reconciliation keeps financial discrepancies away at the speed of transactions happening. However, it is often overlooked and the context is mistaken to be too heavy when clearly it is not.

In this blog, learn what it is, how it works and reasons why doing it manually is not a good idea for your business.

What is payment gateway reconciliation? 

Payment gateway reconciliation involves analyzing payment gateway information and bank balances for matching and identifying any discrepancies. It ensures there are no gaps between both books and if there are it immediately provides you with all the accurate information.

How does payment gateway reconciliation work? 

Here’s are the steps payment gateway reconciliation includes: 

• Transaction Recording: When a customer makes a payment through your website or other channels, the transaction details are recorded in your payment gateway. This includes information about the transaction amount, date, payment method, and customer details.
• Bank Deposits: Funds from these transactions get deposited into your merchant account or bank account after the defined settlement period.
• Reconciliation: The transactions recorded in your payment gateway are compared with the corresponding deposits in your bank account.
• Identifying Discrepancies: These could include missing transactions, duplicate transactions, or errors in transaction amounts.
• Resolution: This typically involves contacting the payment processor or bank to investigate further, correcting any errors in the accounting records, or taking other necessary actions to ensure accurate financial reporting.

Why is payment gateway reconciliation important? 

Here are some reasons why payment gateway reconciliation is so important for your business.

1. Accuracy in financial reporting

With payment gateway reconciliation, both internal and external processes of financing are scrutinized. It helps to ensure that all the financial transactions are accurately recorded and processed. It also helps in compliance with all banking and accounting standards and regulations.

2. Fraud detection and prevention

Reconciliation involves matching the internal records with actual transactions to identify any discrepancies including unauthorized charges, and duplicate transactions. It also helps in preventing any fraudulent activities by keeping a constant check on financial transactions.

4. Improved decision-making

Accurate tracks of financial transactions with every important detail help businesses to remain informed and make strategic decisions about budgeting, forecasting, and resource allocation. This clear understanding allows you to be more confident about your financial decisions.

5. Compliance and auditing

Payment gateway reconciliation ensures compliance and facilitates auditing processes by accurately tracking financial transactions, maintaining transparency, and adhering to regulatory standards. This helps businesses avoid legal issues and financial penalties while ensuring trust and credibility with stakeholders.

6. Customer satisfaction

When transactions are processed accurately and efficiently, customers experience fewer issues such as overcharging, double billing, or payment failures. This reliability in payment processing builds trust and loyalty among customers, enhancing their overall experience with the business.

7. Cash flow management 

By reconciling payments with bank deposits, businesses can track their cash flow more effectively. This allows them to monitor incoming funds, identify any delays or discrepancies, and make informed decisions to manage operational and growth finances.

What are the common challenges of payment reconciliation? 

Some common challenges in manual payment gateway reconciliation process are:

1. Volume of transactions and manual errors 

A high number of transactions challenges the accuracy of the manual payment reconciliation process. It is also time-consuming and there is no guarantee of human errors while transaction matching. This can result in incorrect financial entries affecting financial reporting and decision-making negatively.

2. Complexity of transactions and processes

Financial accounting includes several complex transactions such as:

• Partial payments
• Refunds
• Chargebacks, or 
• Split payments

These can be challenging for manual payment reconciliation as keeping a record and matching these transactions require careful attention to detail.

Also, the reconciliation process in itself if done manually is pretty time-consuming, and the added complexity will only make it more difficult.

3. Timing differences

When a transaction is made and actually processed in a bank account is delayed or done in different timezones, it is a challenge. The manual recordkeeper has to go to an extent to identify the reason for discrepancies happening due to timing differences.

4. Bank reconciliation

The reconciliation process requires all complex banking factors beyond simple credit and debit transactions. It needs to cover factors such as outstanding checks, deposits in transit, bank fees, and interest charges. Ensuring that the bank balance matches the book balance requires thorough examination and adjustment of discrepancies.

5. Resource constraints

Taking care of such a detailed process of book and bank balance matching and ensuring compliance requires a great deal of effort and resources. If done manually, you need to devout the right time & budget and excel in experience.

6. Regulatory compliance

Businesses need to adhere to regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Compliance with standards laid by these regulations is important in every situation otherwise leading to severe penalties and reputational damage. Manually, it is very difficult to keep track of all their standards for every financial operation as businesses need to

• Stay updated with the latest regulatory changes
• Conduct regular audits
• Implement necessary security measures

7. Legacy Systems and fraud detection

Legacy systems lack interoperability or automation capabilities, making payment reconciliation processes inefficient and error-prone. Integrating data from disparate systems and maintaining compatibility with modern tools can be challenging for businesses.

In addition to the same, most legacy systems lack fraud detection capabilities. Their inability to identify suspicious patterns or anomalies in transaction data requires continuous monitoring and analysis, which can be overwhelming to handle.

Consequences of inaccurate reconciliation 

Here are the consequences you must know you can face with inaccurate reconciliation.

1. Financial loss

One of the direct consequences of an inaccurate reconciliation is financial loss. When doing reconciliation manually, you tend to make mistakes such as missing or duplicate transactions, incorrect amounts, or unauthorized charges. It can result in the gap between actual and reported revenue leading to financial discrepancies.

2. Cash flow problems

Inaccurate financial reporting will lead to false information of balance. This may result in cash shortages or delays impacting the business's ability to operate smoothly. It will completely impact your financial planning, leading you to make bad decisions.

3. Compliance issues

Accounting integration reconciliation takes care of compliance with industry standards, and inefficient reconciliation will lead to severe penalties and reputational damage.

4. Fraud and security risks

Inaccurate financial reconciliation can leave you and your business vulnerable to fraud and security breaches. Failure to identify any fraudulent activity in the bank and book balance can lead to great financial losses.

5. Operational disruptions 

Without accurate financial data, businesses can struggle to effectively manage their resources, plan for the future, and make informed business decisions. This could impact both the resources and the skills they need to keep the business running.

6. Reputation damage 

Customers quickly lose trust in the business if they experience billing errors or discrepancies, which can lead to negative reviews, complaints, and loss of business. This can damage the business's reputation among customers, suppliers, investors, and other stakeholders that play a part in their growth.

7. Audit failures

Auditors typically rely on accurate financial records to assess the business's financial health and compliance with regulations. Inaccurate reconciliation can raise red flags and even lead to penalties.

Recommended read: A Guide to Online Payment Security For Business Owners

Why should you use automated payment reconciliation methods? 

Understand why you should use an automated payment getaway reconciliation method with reasons including

1. Time efficiency and accuracy

Automated reconciliation processes and analysis of large amounts of transactional data in no time allow businesses to reduce time and effort. It also uses algorithms and advanced technology to ensure the accuracy of the results is uncompromised.

2. Real-time insights 

Automated reconciliation tools provide you with real-time insights about your transactions. These insights help businesses to:

• Identify trends
• Optimize cash flow management 
• Financial analysis and forecasting 

3. Cost-efficient and scalable

Automation reduces the need for resources required for manual efforts. It allows you to analyze and match bank and book balances with accurate insights without the need for the team. Automated reconciliation systems can also adapt to changing business needs. It is scalable enough to accommodate fluctuations in financial reporting.

4. Easy compliance and fraud detection

With automation, there is no need to keep a close eye on all rules. It helps businesses to maintain compliance in the background. It ensures compliance with all updated industry standards and regulations.

Automated error reconciliation also prevents fraud as early as possible by identifying suspicious patterns in financial transactions. This enables you to get plenty of time to act upon it and save from further damage.

Recommended read: How AI is transforming fraud detection in payments

5. Improved Customer Experience

Automated reconciliation processes can also enhance the customer experience by reducing billing errors, discrepancies, and delays in processing payments.

Customers benefit from smoother transactions and more accurate billing, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.

Recommended read: How to improve payment processing user experience

Simplify payment gateway reconciliation with PayBy

Payment gateway reconciliation can be a very overwhelming process to handle when done manually. This is where using a payment solution like PayBy comes into play.

PayBy enables business growth by easing cashless payments for customers with powerful payment gateway reconciliation features.

Get started to know more.