Reconciliation in payment processing is the practice of comparing transaction records from different sources — typically the merchant’s internal systems, the payment processor’s reports, and the bank’s deposit statements — to verify that every transaction has been correctly captured, settled, and deposited. The goal is to identify discrepancies: missing transactions, duplicate charges, incorrect amounts, failed settlements, or fees that do not match the agreed-upon rate schedule. Without regular reconciliation, businesses risk undetected revenue leakage, accounting errors, and unresolved customer disputes.
At its simplest, reconciliation involves matching each transaction ID from the merchant’s records against the corresponding entry in the processor’s settlement file, then confirming that the net deposited amount aligns with what was expected after fees and adjustments. In practice, this becomes far more involved. Chargebacks, refunds, currency conversions, rolling reserves, and timing differences between authorisation and settlement all create discrepancies that must be investigated and resolved. For businesses processing thousands of transactions daily, manual reconciliation is impractical and error-prone.
The challenge intensifies dramatically for platforms and marketplaces that route payments through multiple PSPs. Each processor delivers settlement data in a different format, on a different schedule, with different fee structures and reporting conventions. A platform using three PSPs might receive three separate settlement files, each with its own transaction identifiers, currency handling, and deduction logic. Reconciling across these sources without a normalisation layer requires significant engineering investment and ongoing maintenance as each PSP updates its APIs or reporting formats.
Shuttle Global addresses this fragmentation by providing a single reconciliation surface across all connected PSPs. Because every transaction — whether processed via Embedded Payments, Payment Links, or Voice Checkout — flows through Shuttle’s unified payment layer, platforms receive consistent, normalised transaction and settlement data regardless of which underlying PSP handled the payment. This eliminates the need to build and maintain separate reconciliation pipelines for each processor, reducing both engineering overhead and the risk of unreconciled transactions slipping through the cracks.