RECONCILIATION · FOUR OF FOUR
The payment record that never arrived
A webhook that failed and was never retried. A nightly export that ran while a transaction was mid-flight. A refund issued in the provider's dashboard by somebody in support, which your order system never hears about.
Why this is the one that matters
Of the four shapes a mismatch takes, this is a problem that needs explicit completeness checks — and it is the one that looks most like the other three.
The others are records that are incomplete, duplicated, or describing different moments. This one is a record that does not exist. Something happened and nothing in your systems knows it happened, which means the gap is not in the comparison, it is in how the systems talk to each other.
Left alone, it does not stay still. A missed webhook today is a wrong balance this month and a wrong figure at year end.
How to tell it is this one
The required record is absent, not different.
That distinction does the whole job. A payment that disagrees with an order is one of the first three shapes. A payment with no order at all, or an order with nothing against it, is this one.
Beware of the comparison that treats an absence as a zero. A missing capture reported as €0.00 reads as an unpaid order, which sends you looking for a customer who in fact paid.
What to do
Find out why it is missing before anything else. Not what the right figure is — why nothing recorded it.
A missing record is not a discrepancy to reconcile, it is a hole in an integration: a webhook with no retry, an export with no boundary, a dashboard action with no path back. Correcting the figure by hand closes the symptom and leaves the hole, and the hole will produce the same morning's work again next month.
This is also the shape that justifies checking on a schedule rather than when somebody notices. The other three are visible whenever you look. This one is only visible if you are looking for something that is not there.
This is one of four
A mismatch between an order system and a payment provider takes four shapes. Each needs to be checked against the source records and may need a different response — which is why the week gets spent arguing about which system is wrong.
IF YOU WANT THIS DONE FOR YOU
I build software that does this,
and I take engagements on it.
You send anonymised order, capture and refund records. I return the findings with evidence your engineers can recompute offline, without the tool that produced them.