Payment Gateway Settlement Reconciliation
A payment gateway payout arrives in your bank account as a single net figure that bundles together dozens or hundreds of individual customer transactions, processing fees, refunds and chargebacks from a rolling settlement period that rarely lines up cleanly with a calendar day. Finance can see the deposit but can't easily tell which specific sales it represents, what was deducted in fees, or whether a refund processed correctly — so this net figure either gets posted as a single unexplained lump sum or someone spends hours manually decomposing the gateway's own reporting to make it match the ledger.
STARTING PRICE
From €299
Standard tier · Multi-step workflow with AI extraction/decisioning and 2-3 integrations.
Get a quote →Saves roughly 4-7 hrs/week for a mid-sized finance team processing meaningful payment volume.
How the automation works
We build a reconciliation pipeline that pulls the gateway's full transaction-level detail — individual sales, fees, refunds, chargebacks and the specific payout batch each belongs to — and matches it against both your sales records and the actual bank deposit, so the net payout figure decomposes into its real components instead of landing as an unexplained number. Fee amounts are validated against your gateway's published rate schedule to catch billing errors, and any transaction included in a payout but missing from your sales system (or vice versa) is flagged as a specific, named exception rather than buried in a variance.
Process flow
- 01
Pull gateway transaction detail integration
Full transaction-level data — individual sales, fees, refunds and chargebacks — is pulled from the gateway API for each settlement period.
- 02
Match to sales records ai
Each gateway transaction is matched against your internal sales or order records to confirm every payout line corresponds to a known sale.
- 03
Validate fee amounts ai
Processing fees on each transaction are checked against the gateway's published rate schedule to catch billing discrepancies rather than accepting the deducted amount at face value.
- 04
Decompose the net payout ai
The single bank deposit is decomposed into its component sales, fees, refunds and chargebacks, so the deposit figure is fully explained rather than posted as one lump sum.
- 05
Flag true exceptions output
Transactions in the payout with no matching sale, or sales with no corresponding payout, are flagged as named exceptions rather than an unexplained variance.
- 06
Post reconciled entries integration
Reconciled sales, fees and refunds are posted to your accounting system with correct GL treatment for each component.
Inputs
- Payment gateway transaction and payout data
- Internal sales/order records
- Gateway fee rate schedule
- Bank deposit records
Outputs
- Decomposed, reconciled payout breakdown
- Fee discrepancy flags
- Unmatched transaction exception list
- Posted GL entries by component (sales/fees/refunds)
Works with
Prefer a fully custom build instead of an off-the-shelf integration? We scope both options during your free consultation — most jobs like this one work fine on standard connectors, but higher-volume or non-standard systems sometimes need bespoke API work, reflected in the complex tier.
Where this goes wrong if you get it wrong
- A gateway's settlement period rarely lines up with a calendar day or your bank's posting date — a sale on the last day of the month might settle and deposit in the following month, and the reconciliation needs to match on the gateway's actual payout batch boundaries, not assume same-day settlement.
- Refunds and chargebacks reduce a payout in ways that don't always map cleanly to when the original sale was recorded, especially for chargebacks arriving weeks or months after the original transaction — track these against the original sale explicitly rather than treating them as unrelated current-period deductions.
- Gateway fee structures often include tiered rates, volume discounts, or currency conversion markups that aren't a flat percentage — validating fees against a naive flat-rate assumption will generate constant false discrepancies; use the actual published rate schedule including any negotiated terms.
- Multi-currency settlement, common for gateways serving international customers, means the payout amount reflects a conversion rate applied by the gateway that may differ from your own accounting FX rate — reconcile using the gateway's actual conversion rate for that transaction, not your internal rate, or the numbers will never tie out.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't our bank deposit match our daily sales figures?
Gateway settlement periods rarely align with calendar days, and the deposit is a net figure after fees, refunds and chargebacks — this reconciliation decomposes that net number back into its component parts so it actually explains itself.
Can this catch overcharged processing fees?
Yes, fees on each transaction are validated against the gateway's published rate schedule, which surfaces billing errors that would otherwise just be silently absorbed as part of an unexplained net payout.
Does this work with multiple payment gateways at once?
Yes, if your business processes payments through more than one gateway, each is reconciled against its own rate schedule and settlement pattern, with a combined view across all of them.
How does it handle chargebacks that arrive months after the original sale?
Chargebacks are matched back to their original transaction explicitly, regardless of how much time has passed, rather than treated as an unrelated deduction in whichever period they happen to land.