Your guide to the best practices of payment reconciliation

If you have an e-commerce business or are running an offline store you must already be knowing 'what is payment reconciliation.' For the uninitiated and new business owners read on to understand why you need to reconcile payment transactions and how having the best online reconciliation system can drive your business towards success. Here's your guide to payment reconciliation:

In simpler terms, understanding and cross-checking your cash flow, expenditure and profit can be defined as payment reconciliation. It involves comparing internal financial records with external bank statements to ensure the accounts are accurate. The reconciliation process gives you a realistic assessment of cashflow and business sustainability. It is ultimately a business owner's decision to reconcile records, accounts, or balance sheets daily, weekly, or monthly. For high-risk businesses and businesses transacting in large volumes, daily payment reconciliation can save them from running into complications.

Importance of payment reconciliation

Reconciling your payment means taking a hard look at the business transactions right from all expenditures to incomes - to understand the growth opportunities and chart your future business expansion.

If you are not reconciling your payment regularly, your business growth can get impacted due to perceived positive cash flows. Your brand equity can take a severe beating in the absence of timely detection of fraudulent payments.

Most common errors made in the payment reconciliation process:

• Not following the same cycle for payment reconciliation
• Human errors while inputting data
• Absence of a centralised or automated platform to assess payments from across different stores

Whether you are an owner of a small or large business, reconciling payment transactions should be on top of your list. It can help you detect fraud resulting from unauthorised transactions, catch errors, and aim for timely settlement to employees, partners and vendors.

As online payment methods in India gain popularity, many companies have embraced payment gateways as a one-stop solution for not just acceptance of multiple modes of digital payments but also for things like payment reconciliation and settlement. Pine Labs' Plural Gateway has emerged as a preferred choice of small and large businesses alike. It offers an integrated dashboard for reconciliation where you can get detailed payment analytics and analyse the popular payment modes and preferred transaction amounts among your customers. You can leverage this data to optimise sales and build marketing initiatives accordingly.

Switching to Plural Gateway will automate the payment reconciliation process and eliminate human errors and inconsistencies. Plural Gateway integrates with all major platforms and enables multiple payment options at the checkout, including net banking, wallet, UPI, and debit/credit card. It also enables Buy Now Pay Later EMI purchase option for your customers leading to increased value of shopping cart and more sales.

Here are some of the features of Plural Gateway:

• Deeper insight into analytics
• Easy 'plug-n-play' integration
• Quicker transactions
• Unified dashboard for all payments and payment-related insights
• Advanced reporting system
• Advanced settlement dashboard
• Easy-to-use plugins for e-commerce technology providers such as Magneto, OpenCart, Woocommerce and Prestashop
• Pine Labs Affordability Engine for no-cost EMIs on bank or brand offers
• Status update for every successful, pending or failed transactions
• Plural Payout APIs to pay vendors and employees and issue refunds
• APIs to schedule payments in advance or in bulk

Selecting the right payment gateway to collect payments and automate the reconciliation process is crucial for your business. In the absence of a right and apt payment gateway, payment reconciliation can be a tedious and complicated task. Different modes of payment, different schedules of batch settlement with up to five days of delays, and separate settlement cycles for chargebacks and reversals can lead to complications if you don't have the right payment gateway to simplify this data.

The bottom line

As a business owner, you should be focused on its growth and not spend too much effort into managing business processes that can be effortless and easily automated. Choose Pine Labs Plural Gateway and leverage its automated payment reconciliation system. If you have questions regarding onboarding or need more information, please reach out to pgsupport@pinelabs.co.in or call 1800-309-9007.