Settlement reconciliation terms, explained

The process of matching payouts from marketplaces, payment gateways, and banks against the orders or transactions that generated them — and flagging any variance in amount, fees, or timing.

The process by which cash-on-delivery funds collected by a marketplace or logistics partner are transferred to the merchant, typically 7–21 days after delivery.

The difference between the commission a marketplace was contracted to charge on an order and the commission actually deducted in the settlement report.

Amazon India's per-seller settlement report, issued weekly, that documents every order, commission, fee, tax, and deduction for the reporting period.

ReconPe's proprietary 6-stage probabilistic matching pipeline that profiles data, cascades through blocking levels, scores candidates with Bayesian confidence, and enforces domain invariants.

A statistical framework for record linkage that assigns weights to matched/unmatched field agreement and computes an overall match probability for each candidate pair.

The percentage fee a payment gateway charges merchants for processing card or UPI transactions, typically ranging from 0% to 2.5% depending on instrument and merchant category.

A unique identifier assigned to every NEFT, RTGS, or IMPS bank transfer in India, used to trace a specific settlement credit from a payment gateway to a merchant's bank account.

A fixed-width text format published by the Bank Administration Institute for transmitting cash management balance and transaction data from banks to corporate customers.

A SWIFT FIN message used by banks to deliver end-of-day account statements to corporate and institutional customers, containing opening balance, transaction detail, and closing balance for one account.

A SWIFT FIN message used to deliver intraday balance and transaction updates between scheduled MT940 end-of-day statements, allowing treasury teams to track cash positions in near real time.

An international standard for electronic financial messaging that defines an XML-based data model for payments, securities, trade, cards, and FX — designed to replace legacy formats including SWIFT MT and country-specific schemas.

The settlement cycle of India's National Electronic Funds Transfer system, in which transfers are batched and settled in half-hourly windows operated by the Reserve Bank of India around the clock.

A continuous gross-settlement system in which interbank transfers are settled individually and irrevocably in central-bank money the moment they are processed, used in India for transfers of ₹2 lakh and above.

An instant interbank funds-transfer service in India operated by NPCI, available 24×7×365, used for retail transfers up to ₹5 lakh that need to settle within seconds.

A member-owned cooperative that provides a secure messaging network used by banks and financial institutions worldwide to send standardised payment, securities, treasury, and trade messages.

An account that one bank holds with another bank in a foreign currency, used to settle international transactions on behalf of customers — literally Italian for 'ours'.

The same account as a nostro, viewed from the perspective of the bank that holds it on behalf of another — literally Italian for 'yours'.

An accounts-payable control that requires the supplier invoice to match the purchase order on key fields — typically vendor, item, quantity, and price — before payment is approved.

An accounts-payable control that requires the supplier invoice to match both the purchase order and the goods-receipt note on key fields before payment is approved.

A general-ledger account used to temporarily record transactions whose correct posting is unknown or pending investigation, with the expectation that the balance will eventually clear to zero.

A settlement convention in which final transfer of funds (or securities) occurs N business days after the trade or transaction date, where T is the trade date and N is the lag in days.

Transactions on a sub-ledger or reconciliation account that have been posted but not yet matched to an offsetting entry, remaining 'open' until cleared.

A general-ledger account used to temporarily hold transactions during a multi-step process — for example between a payment instruction and its confirmed bank settlement — and that should clear to zero once the process completes.

A discrepancy between an internal record of an expected bank transaction and the corresponding entry on the bank statement — either the entry is missing, the amount differs, or it is duplicated.

The accounting process of finalising all transactions, accruals, reconciliations, and adjustments for a given period — typically a month, quarter, or year — to produce reportable financial statements.

An instant real-time payment system in India developed by NPCI, allowing peer-to-peer and merchant transactions directly from bank accounts via mobile devices using addresses called Virtual Payment Addresses.

A bulk payment system operated by NPCI in India for repetitive and periodic transactions such as salary credits, dividend payments, EMI debits, and utility bill collections.

An NPCI-operated payment system in India that lets a customer access their bank account at a banking correspondent terminal using Aadhaar number and biometric authentication, primarily for cash withdrawal, balance enquiry, and small fund transfer.

An Indian income-tax provision requiring e-commerce operators to deduct tax at source on the gross amount of sales of goods or services facilitated through their platform on behalf of the seller.

A GST provision requiring e-commerce operators to collect tax at source at 0.5 percent (0.25 percent CGST + 0.25 percent SGST, or 0.5 percent IGST for inter-state) on the net taxable supplies made through their platform.

The process of matching the input tax credit reported by suppliers in their GSTR-1 (which auto-populates a recipient's GSTR-2B) against the recipient's purchase records, to ensure all eligible input credit is claimed and no ineligible credit is taken.

India's electronic invoicing system under GST, in which B2B invoices above a notified turnover threshold must be reported to the Invoice Registration Portal which returns a unique Invoice Reference Number and a signed QR code.

A printed or electronic record produced by a card terminal at the time of sale, used as the merchant's evidence of an authorised transaction and matched against the acquirer's daily settlement file.

The bi-weekly disbursement Amazon issues to sellers using Fulfillment by Amazon, after deducting referral fees, FBA fulfillment fees, storage fees, returns, and any reserves on the seller's account balance.

Flipkart's per-cycle settlement export to sellers, detailing every order, commission, fixed fee, collection fee, shipping fee, and tax for a given payment cycle, along with the net amount remitted to the seller's bank account.

An e-commerce shipment outcome in which an order shipped to the customer is undelivered and returned to the seller's warehouse — typically due to refused delivery, customer not available, or address issues.

Time-based categories used to group open items on a reconciliation, accounts receivable, or accounts payable report — typically 0–30, 31–60, 61–90, 91–180, and 180+ days — to show the maturity profile of unresolved items.

A fee charged by a marketplace or 3PL to a seller for handling the return shipment of an undelivered or returned order — covering pickup, transport, quality check, and re-warehousing.

A family of hashing techniques designed so that similar inputs map to the same hash bucket with high probability — used to find approximate-match candidates in large datasets without comparing every pair.

A technique in record linkage in which records are partitioned into smaller subsets (blocks) such that only records within the same block are compared — making the matching problem computationally tractable on large datasets.

A string-similarity metric that counts the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions, or substitutions) required to transform one string into another.

The phenomenon in which the structure of a recurring data feed — column names, column order, data types, or value formats — changes over time, breaking downstream consumers that assume a fixed shape.