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Gold1420

System Design

Reconciliation Jobs

Comparing your ledger against the processor statement to catch drift and missing entries.

5 min read · core · beat Gold to climb

What reconciliation does

A reconciliation job compares your internal ledger against an external statement from a bank or payment processor. It finds transactions present in one source but not the other, and amounts that disagree.

Why drift happens

  • A webhook may be lost so your ledger misses a capture.
  • A charge may settle later than your record expects.
  • Fees or rounding applied by the processor change the net amount.

How a job runs

  • Pull the processor report for a period.
  • Match each external line to an internal record by a shared identifier.
  • Bucket results into matched, missing internally, and missing externally.

Handling exceptions

  • Generate an exception for every unmatched or mismatched line.
  • Route exceptions to a review queue rather than auto correcting blindly.
  • Track the age of open exceptions so none are forgotten.

Key idea

Reconciliation jobs continuously compare your ledger with the processor record, surfacing drift as exceptions so money never quietly goes missing.

Check yourself

Answer to earn rating on the learn ladder.

1. What does a reconciliation job compare?

2. What should happen to an unmatched line?