Reconciliation
Reconciliation is proving your books against independent records: bank statements, settlement reports, payout data, inventory counts. Every balance is matched to its source and every difference explained. In ecommerce the workhorse is settlement-to-deposit reconciliation, tying what the marketplace says you earned to what the bank says you received, penny for penny. It's the control that separates books you can trust from books that merely look finished.
Unreconciled books drift, and the drift always hides something. A real example pattern from onboarding: a seller's QuickBooks showed Amazon income $14,000 higher than settlements supported. The reconciliation surfaced a stack of missed refunds, a reserve hold recorded as revenue, and $1,800 of FBA reimbursements Amazon owed but the seller had never claimed. Every one of those was invisible from the bank feed.
Reconciliation is also what diligence actually is: a buyer's QoE team reconciles your claimed revenue to settlements and 1099-Ks, and books that have been reconciled monthly sail through while books reconciled never come apart in week one. It's the least glamorous work in accounting and the most valuable, which is why every account in a monthly bookkeeping engagement is reconciled before the close is called done, on the timeline our month-end close guarantee commits to.
Where this shows up in our work
This isn’t textbook material for us; it’s the day-to-day of keeping seller books right. See how we handle it in practice:
Monthly Ecommerce Bookkeeping→Related terms