Reconciliation
Matching what the till says was taken against what actually arrived in the bank account. It is the daily admin cost of accepting payment, and it scales with the number of separate accounts, statements and settlement cycles a merchant is running — not with turnover.
Why it matters to a merchant
The work is small when the merchant has the right two documents and endless when they do not: the provider's settlement report and the bank statement, matched at batch level. Most of the pain merchants describe as "the numbers never agree" is a reporting-access problem rather than an arithmetic one — the figures agree, but one side of the comparison was never available.
Where this comes up
Pages on this site that deal with this in context:
Related terms
In this section: How a payment moves