What is a reconciliation tool and how does it work?

Revenue reconciliation tool is software that can automatically reconcile invoices and bookings using APIs and Airtable script. It provides a solution for any company working in the e-commerce, hospitality, or travel sectors.

It will help you get to know your sales by providing detailed information about every transaction that has taken place during a given period. You will be able to see exactly how much money was made through each transaction as well as how much was spent on each customer. This information is vital for businesses that want to identify where they are spending their money, which customers are spending most of their money, and on which customers are spending less than expected.

Challenges

Our difficulty with a client is always that they are writing invoices, offers, closing deals, and opening deals, but the challenge is that they are not receiving cash for the invoices they pay. So, the similarity between bank accounts, Stripe, WooCommerce, and all the payment methods they have is equivalent to the invoices they wrote. As a result, the accounting and finance departments are suffering greatly. As a result, the analysis for the revenue overview and reconciliation necessitates the use of different data sources.

They spend a lot of time analyzing their data, but it's not always clear what happened with unmatched items. To make matters worse, analysis requires combining multiple data sources and matching items manually in Excel or Google Sheets using lookup functions that can be difficult to understand and maintain. Of course, they just want an invoice summary for everything to be sent to their central accounting system automatically. As an example, with Datev or Lexoffice.

Customer Situation

If you are an online business, then you are probably using a payment provider like Stripe or PayPal to collect money from your customers. But how do you reconcile the invoices and bookings?

You could go through all your transactions manually, but that is not only time-consuming but also prone to human error. You want to make sure all transactions are accounted for and need to keep track of booking cancellations as well.

As a customer, we collect their bills from all their platforms and deliver them to their accounting system. We can even import it into Datev through API and mark it as done, when the invoice number and payment match, as well as the payment date.  

That's where Chargebee comes in! Chargebee is an invoice management tool that allows you to automatically reconcile invoices and bookings using APIs and Airtable Scripts:

1) Get Chargebee invoices and credit notes in 1 click

2) Import DATEV bookings via CSV to Airtable

3) Click to trigger matching script that looks for matching invoice number, date, amount and flags mismatches

Result of reconciliation automation

As a result of the outcome or solution we supplied to our customers, they now have three times better and faster procedures because the finance and accounting departments just need to check whether it is properly matching. And validate that this is done and that as time passes, the precision of the tool improves since they can map it by hand and even modify it, but the automation also receives monthly updates because occasionally a line break and WooCommerce arise, etc. So, for outgoing and incoming bills as well as payments, we automated the payment summary and revenue comparison.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, we can all agree that we want to spend less time on our accounting tasks. In conclusion, the Revenue Reconciliation tool has been a great success. It has reduced the processing time to a minimum, and it is highly reliable. In addition, it can easily be scaled up in order to accommodate any future growth.

Tired of spending hours reconciling sales and cash received with spreadsheets?

We're here to help you become more efficient!