Settlement & reconciliation

The processes of receiving funds from providers and matching them back to transactions and ledger entries.

When this matters

You operate across multiple PSPs, acquirers, or methods.
Finance and ops teams are spending a lot of time in spreadsheets.
You are preparing for audits or investor diligence.

Operator tips

Push providers to supply consistent, machine-readable payout and fee files.
Define a single internal source of truth for balances and payouts.
Automate reconciliation for the highest-volume flows before edge cases.

How to use this term

Use this definition when you are aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, finance, and operations. Shared vocabulary makes it much easier to argue about tradeoffs without talking past each other.

For deeper context, pair this term with the free assessment and providers/methods directories. They give you a concrete view of how concepts show up in real stacks.