Credit card reconciliation: check out how to do it now

Credit reconciliation is essential for the financial control of your business. Does your company already adopt this practice?

If you want to have more predictability about how much you will receive and be able to invest in your store, you must be careful when checking your cash flow in comparison with your sales records. This involves practicing reconciliation, to better plan your finances and maintain the financial health of your business.

Thinking about helping you incorporate it into your company’s day-to-day life, we created this post to explain what credit reconciliation is, how it works and what its role is for small businesses. We will also bring some tips for you to reconcile and show how technology can help in this process. Want to know more? So, come read!

What is credit reconciliation?

Credit card reconciliation corresponds to the validation of data from a sale made using a card, ensuring control over transactions carried out in the business. One of the objectives of reconciliation is to check whether your sales were actually paid in accordance with the amount charged, to avoid financial gaps in your cash flow.

This practice must be done by store owners to check whether the information on the credit card machine corresponds to the values ​​of the recorded sales transactions.

It may happen, for example, that you have a card receipt relating to a sale, but the value of which does not appear recorded in your system. Conciliation allows you to identify this type of situation in your company, understand what happened and take action quickly to prevent the situation from getting worse.

With reconciliation, you can have clarity about the financial movement carried out through the acquirer, from sales, receipts and cancellations, to adjustments, chargebacks and fees. In other words, reconciliation allows you to have a broad view of all operations that directly impact your cash flow.

In this process, with the card machine, you have access to the gross and net values ​​of transactions for even more efficient control, understanding the business’s available balance.

Furthermore, if you work with automatic payments, reconciliation allows you to see if they were made correctly.

How does credit reconciliation work?

Credit reconciliation works as a monitoring of the amounts that your business receives, in comparison to what is recorded in your systems (or spreadsheet).

This process is very efficient to have greater visibility regarding your receivables and compare internal control (cash flow, or inflows and outflows) with the account balance, in addition to helping with decision making.

The idea is to reconcile bank statements in relation to the cash balance, check inflows and outflows and detect possible discrepancies between these values.

What is the role of credit reconciliation?

Credit reconciliation helps you know if you are receiving what you should for your sales to have more efficient financial control in your business. This practice also contributes to having more predictability about the amounts to be received.

This means you can make more accurate planning , with realistic information about the business. This way, you can plan a certain investment in your store, such as a renovation or the launch of a new product.

Investing in this practice also means having your balances always updated, so that you know how much money you have to allocate, can identify fraud and scams and identify if you missed making any payments.

Furthermore, credit reconciliation also aims to check the fees charged for each transaction, depending on the brand, and analyze whether they are in accordance with what was previously agreed. These fees may vary, for example, depending on the payment method used, such as installments or cash.

Thus, it is possible to quickly notice errors in operations, such as cancellations and duplication of sales, which can be verified by contacting the acquirer to reverse this situation.

Now that you know what credit card reconciliation is, how it works and what its function is, let’s see how you can do the reconciliation efficiently. Check it out below!

Tips for credit card reconciliation

We have separated 3 tips for you to do the reconciliation correctly in your company and enjoy all the benefits of this practice. Come and see!

Keep daily records

Daily records are essential for you to have a basis for comparison when checking statements and invoices. Therefore, do not neglect this point. These records can be made in a spreadsheet or in software, although the latter is more recommended, as we will see later.

The practice of recording values ​​prevents scams and fraud on machines, which happen when a person with bad intentions exchanges the original device and the amount charged in the transaction is transferred to the person who is carrying out the scam.

However, with credit card reconciliation this can be discovered promptly and reversed so as not to cause further damage to the business.

Keep track of rates by brand

As different brands may have different rates, you need to pay attention to this point during the credit card reconciliation process, otherwise you could end up making wrong calculations that harm your business financially.

Therefore, write down all fees and check which brand was used in each transaction. The idea is to compare your records with what appears on the machine to check if the information matches.

After all, if the fees were charged incorrectly and you did not carry out adequate verification, you could end up with an amount that does not correspond to the established contract. If this happens every month, imagine the financial loss your company will suffer?

Use technology to help

Credit card reconciliation can even be done manually, on paper or using a spreadsheet. But this greatly increases the chances of errors, such as duplication of information and typing problems. This leads to calculation errors and financial losses that can take time to be detected.

In this scenario, using technology is an excellent alternative to automate the reconciliation process, guarantee data security, always have up-to-date information and have a backup of the transactions carried out.

Furthermore, manual reconciliation ends up taking a lot of time. With technology, everything is automatic, increasing the company’s productivity.

How to control credit card receipts?

Controlling credit card receipts can be a lot of work if it is a manual process. Therefore, here too it is interesting to use technology to carry out control, as in a management system.

This way, you have more control over your cash flow and your records, including transaction dates and amounts. Automatically, you can choose a certain date to understand what the amount available in your account will be, based on the information gathered on your machine. This makes it much easier to plan, think about the best strategies and make decisions.

Furthermore, by avoiding scams and undue charges, you maintain the company’s financial health, with more security and comfort for your daily life.