Reconciling your register to your bank deposits
What your register says you sold on cards and what arrives in your bank account are two different numbers, and the difference is not always fees. Batches that did not close, transactions that settled a day late, refunds, chargebacks, holds and adjustments all live in that gap.
A monthly reconciliation finds them while they are still fixable. Without one, the only signal is a vague sense that the deposits look light, which is not something you can act on.
What are the three numbers?
Register card sales for the period. Processor gross settlement for the same period. Bank deposits received. They should tie together with fees and known adjustments explaining every difference.
Most small stores have never compared the first two, because the register and the processor are separate systems and nobody owns the join. That is exactly why discrepancies persist.
Why do register and processor totals differ?
Timing, mostly. A batch closing at ten-thirty at night belongs to that day; a sale rung at eleven belongs to the next batch. Month-end cuts through the middle of that, so the last day and the first day never match exactly and should not.
Beyond timing: voids that were rung as sales and voided after the batch, tips adjusted after the fact, and offline transactions that settled later than the sale. Each of those is legitimate and each moves a number.
Why do processor and bank totals differ?
Fees, if you are on daily net funding, or not at all if fees are billed monthly. Chargebacks debited. Refunds. Reserve amounts withheld. Adjustments. And holds, which show up as a missing deposit rather than as a line item.
A missing deposit is the one worth chasing the same day. Everything else can wait for the monthly pass; a deposit that simply did not arrive means something happened that you have not been told about.
What does the routine look like?
Once a month, an hour. Pull register card totals by day. Pull the processor's settlement report for the same days. Line them up and mark anything that does not match within a day's timing shift. Then match settlement to bank deposits and account for fees.
Do it on a fixed day so it happens. Reconciliation is the task that is never urgent, which is why it is the one that never gets done.
Make it somebody's job by name. In a store with a bookkeeper, this belongs to them with the batch reports supplied; in an owner-run store it belongs to the owner, on the same morning every month, before the day starts.
What does it catch?
Batches that did not close, which is the most common and the most expensive. Duplicate refunds. Chargebacks you were not aware of, since notices go to an email nobody reads. Fee changes. And, occasionally, a rate that quietly moved.
It also produces your effective rate as a by-product, which is the single most useful number for evaluating any competing offer. Investopedia's overview of a merchant account covers the vocabulary if anyone on your team needs it.
What if the numbers will not tie?
Work backwards from the largest discrepancy rather than trying to balance everything at once. Pick the single day with the biggest gap, pull the batch report for it, and find the transaction. One found discrepancy usually explains a pattern.
If it still will not tie, call your provider with a specific date and a specific amount. A support call that names a day and a figure gets a real answer; one that says the deposits look wrong gets a general explanation of how funding works.
Frequently asked questions
How long should this take once it is a habit?
Under an hour a month for a single store with one terminal, assuming your reports are easy to pull. The first time takes longer because you are learning where the numbers live.
Does my accountant do this already?
They reconcile bank deposits to your books. They usually do not reconcile register card sales to processor settlement, because they do not have the register data. That is the gap worth closing.
What if my deposits are net of fees?
Then your gross settlement and your deposit will never match directly, and you need the processor's statement to bridge them. Either arrangement works; you just have to know which you have.
Should I reconcile daily instead?
Daily is better if your volume justifies it, and a thirty-second glance at yesterday's batch total against yesterday's register card total catches most problems within a day. The monthly pass then becomes a formality.
What is the most common single cause of a gap?
A batch that did not close, by a wide margin. It is also the easiest to prevent, with an automatic close set shortly after your last sale.
Do I need software for this?
No. A spreadsheet with three columns does it for a single store. Software becomes worth it at several locations or several terminals, where the manual version stops being an hour.
What if I find money is genuinely missing?
Then you have a date, an amount and a batch, which is everything a provider needs to investigate. Most gaps resolve as timing or an unclosed batch; the few that do not are exactly the cases where having the paperwork already assembled decides how quickly you get an answer.
What should I keep afterwards?
The month's reconciliation, the settlement report and the bank statement, together. If a discrepancy surfaces later, having the period already tied out turns a research project into a lookup.