03 — Reconciling
Prove the money actually arrived.
Taking the payment is not the same as being paid. The gap between the two is where a shop quietly loses money it never knows about.
A SkySale customer
Three merchant websites a day, replaced by one morning result.
A cosmetic studio · three locations · shared staff
Automatic audit: 12.6 h a month back
| Where the time goes | Hours / month |
|---|---|
| Before · Logging in to three merchant websites every day to check each batch report against the POS — 30 min a day × 30 days | 15 h |
| With SkySale · Reading each studio’s morning result, and opening the odd flagged day — 3 studios × (1 min a day + 2 flagged days × 10 min) | 2.4 h |
| Back | 12.6 h |
The studio’s own figures. See all three jobs, and the 52.6 hours a month they add up to →
The daily gap
Two numbers that should match, and usually don't.
The register says you took a certain amount in card payments. The processor settles something else. In most shops nobody finds out for a month, and by then nobody can remember the day well enough to explain it.
- Your sales against their batch
- The day's card transactions in the register lined up against what the processor actually settled, one against one — not two totals that differ by an amount nobody can account for.
- What didn't match, and on which side
- A sale the register has and the processor doesn't. A credit on their side with no refund on yours. Each one named, with its amount and its receipt, so it is a thing you can go and look at rather than a discrepancy you can only stare at.
- Declines and offsets kept separate
- Failed attempts, offsetting entries and over-limit transactions are pulled out on their own rather than buried in one difference. Most of a day's gap is usually one of these, and none of it is money missing.
- Save an audit, re-run it later
- A period you've checked can be reopened and recalculated against the current records, so a correction made since shows up — rather than being frozen into a report from the day you ran it.
Why it matters here
On a five-figure sale, a rounding difference isn't rounding.
- Gift cards aren't card payments
- Store credit, gift cards and comps never reach the processor, so they're recorded as what they are. Filed as card payments they'd be hunted for in the settlement batch and reported missing every single day.
- A refund with no sale behind it
- Shows up immediately rather than at the end of the quarter. So does a sale that was rung up and never settled, which is the one that costs you the money.
Get in touch
Bring us a day that didn't balance.
Send a settlement report and the same day from your register, and we'll show you what the difference was made of.