What does reconciliation mean and why is it so important?

The term “reconciliation” describes the process of reconciling data in different accounting areas. Account reconciliation, for example, involves comparing accounts with external data, for instance account statements. If an entry is missing or a payment entered twice, this must be corrected. This is because the aim is to reflect the actual balance in your accounts in the bookkeeping process. For you as a trader, this is also important because companies are required by law to produce a coherent annual financial statement. In addition to account reconciliation, there are also many other types of reconciliation.

• For example, cash reconciliation in a shop checks whether the real cash balance matches the calculated cash balance.
• Customer reconciliation, on the other hand, checks to see if there are any deviations between revenue and payments. Have all invoices been settled? Are the correct currency exchange rates entered for shops abroad? Have price reductions been taken into consideration?
• Transaction reconciliation in turn makes sure that your business’s actual transactions match the ones entered in your books. Have all transactions reported actually been processed?

What options are available for transaction reconciliation?

Transaction coordination in particular can prove particularly complicated if you are a trader. In light of this, PostFinance offers ways to reconcile your transactions with the accounting system. Here we distinguish between distance selling via an online shop and on-site sales with terminals:

Online shop

If a customer buys something in your online shop, you will receive a reconciliation file for the transaction from your acceptance partner (depending on the payment method), and this file should match the credit on your account. With that said, each acceptance partner uses their own file format. As a trader, you must import each of these formats into your ERP system. To simplify this process, Swiss Post offers a consolidated view of the sales reports for each acceptance partner in the product Checkout Flex. This allows you as a business to easily obtain the authorized transactions across all payment methods, import them into your ERP system and reconcile them with the credit of the acceptance partners.

And Checkout Flex offers yet another benefit when it comes to accounting: simplified sub-ledger accounting. This enables you to set up the chart of accounts in such a way that the transfer of entries to the main ledger (e.g. with the supplier Bexio) or to other ERP systems is taken care of, and only a few entries have to be transferred manually.

What’s more, PostFinance provides a credit advice for manual transaction reconciliation when it comes to e-payment. Two different reconciliation file types are also a possibility, with one of them for the ep2 infrastructure in XML format for semi-automated or fully automated reconciliation.

On-site sales with terminals

In contrast to distance selling, the standardization of reconciliation files is a bit more advanced: thanks to the ep2 standard, all ep2 acquirers, including PostFinance, offer standardized RAF files for the PostFinance Card. These can be further processed via a point-of-sale management system, for instance Matchbox from The link will open in a new window Treibauf or ReconHub from The link will open in a new window Abrantix, in order to be exported into an accounting or ERP system. The suppliers’ tools often already contain interfaces with ERP systems so that you can integrate them directly into your accounting process. PostFinance also offers a credit advice for its own payment method for the purposes of manual reconciliation.