Reconciliation of Payment Card Transactions

Purpose

The reconciliation process allows oil companies to match payment card transaction data received from the service station POS systems against the same transactions received from another source, such as:

  • Transactions received from the clearing house which have been approved for payment to the oil company

  • Transactions received from the Card Services company which were on-line authorized at the time of sale

The process can assist oil companies in finding inconsistencies in data received from the POS systems and/or differences in payment received versus expected from the clearing houses. Unmatched data can then be easily found and investigated by the oil company. Furthermore, complaint processing can then be used to handle further processing of the unmatched transactions. For further details, see Complaint Processing for Payment Card Transactions .

Data can be received from clearing houses/card services companies in either an aggregated (summary information) or detailed (transaction by transaction) format. Interfaces are provided for both data formats. For further information on the Reconciliation Interfaces, see Interfaces to External Systems .

Prerequisites

For information about the general prerequisites for SSR payment card handling, see the corresponding section of Payment Card Handling .

For the reconciliation process to function, payment card transaction data must have been uploaded from service stations into the Detailed Transaction Files (DTFs) , and corresponding data must have been uploaded from the clearing house/card services company.

In Customizing for the Industry Solution Oil & Gas (Downstream) , you must maintain reconciliation settings by choosing Start of the navigation path SSR Next navigation step Payment Card Handling Next navigation step Clearing House Next navigation step Clearing House Reconciliation End of the navigation path .

Process Flow

  1. Reconciliation is started either manually or automatically. For more information see Running the Reconciliation Process . You can use this process to:

  • Match payment card transactions that were received from the clearing house in a detailed format, where the transactions are compared line by line against the POS system data.

  • Match payment card transactions that were received from the clearing house in a summarized (aggregated) format, where the summary information is compared against each transaction from the POS system data and the sum of the transaction values from the POS system data is compared to the total value received in the summary information.

  • Mark unmatched transactions with a complaint result, where the complaint processing function may continue processing these transactions.

  • Identify transactions, for example, that the clearing houses did not approve for payment to the oil company.

  • Identify transactions, for example, received from the service station POS systems that were not correctly authorized at the time of sale.

  1. Reconciled POS system and clearing house transaction data is updated with a reconciliation run number, denoting that the items were reconciled according to the matching parameters defined in Customizing.

  1. Unreconciled data can either remain unreconciled or be marked with a complaint result, which can be further processed using complaint processing.