Gateway payouts
A payment processor does not hand over money order by order. It collects payments, holds them, and pays a lump into your bank some days later.
That lump is a payout, and it will not match any day's sales.
Why it never matches
Several reasons at once, which is what makes it awkward:
- The payout covers a period, not a day, and the boundaries rarely line up with yours.
- Fees are deducted before it is sent, so the amount is net.
- Refunds issued in the period come off it.
- Payments made near the cut-off fall into whichever side of it the processor decided.
So "the bank says £4,812.66 and our orders say £5,140.00" is the normal state of affairs, not a fault.
Payouts and their lines
Yessort records the payout as a whole, and the lines making it up — the individual payments, refunds and deductions the processor combined.
The lines are the point. A single figure cannot be reconciled against anything; a list of the payments inside it can be matched against the orders that produced them, leaving fees and timing differences as the explained remainder.
What reconciling it tells you
That the money you expected arrived, and that the difference between gross sales and net cash is accounted for rather than merely assumed.
Left unreconciled, a shortfall from a genuine problem — a chargeback, a payment never captured — looks exactly like ordinary fees and timing. Which is the reason to do it at all.
Not the same as reconciliation exceptions
Two similar-sounding jobs, worth keeping apart.
A payout reconciles money against payments — did what the processor said it sent actually arrive.
A reconciliation exception compares Yessort's records against the accounting provider's — do the two systems agree about what was posted.
Different questions, different screens, different fixes.