UTR (Unique Transaction Reference)
UTRA 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.
The Unique Transaction Reference (UTR) is India's standard identifier for inter-bank transfers. Every NEFT, RTGS, IMPS, or settlement transfer carries a UTR that should appear on both the sending side's record (the payment gateway's settlement report) and the receiving side's record (the merchant's bank statement).
For settlement reconciliation, UTR is the primary matching key between gateway settlements and bank credits. A gateway like Razorpay issues one settlement with a UTR, and that same UTR should surface on the merchant's bank statement for the corresponding credit. If it doesn't match cleanly, you have an unmatched settlement.
In practice, UTR matching is rarely clean — bank statements often truncate UTRs, prefix them with internal codes, or change case. This is why probabilistic matching (exact → fuzzy → nearest-neighbour) is necessary for gateway-to-bank reconciliation.