Plain-language definitions for the terms you will see in your reconciliation reports – what they mean, and why they show up the way they do.
Balance Details
Also called: the Balance Details export
The payment processor's own record of every deposit, fee, refund, and payout related to your account, exported as a file. This is the source document our reconciliation tool checks your camp system's records against.
Disbursement (Payout)
A batch of money the payment processor sends to your bank account. Each disbursement is made up of the individual card transactions, refunds, and fees that happened since the last one – its total should equal the sum of everything that went into it.
Reconciliation
The process of confirming that a disbursement's total is fully explained by real transactions – matching every dollar in a payout back to the specific charges, refunds, or fees that make it up, so nothing is left unaccounted for.
Tagged Transaction
A transaction that the processor's own ledger directly links to one specific disbursement. Tagged transactions are the easiest to reconcile, since the ledger already tells us which payout they belong to.
Untagged Transaction
A transaction that appears in the ledger but is not directly linked to any particular disbursement. It still happened and still needs to be accounted for somewhere – our tool works out which disbursement it actually belongs to based on dates and amounts.
Inferred Transaction
A transaction shown as part of a disbursement's makeup even though the processor's ledger did not directly tag it there. It is included because the math and dates line up exactly – not a guess, but a conclusion drawn from the numbers.
Negative Disbursement
A "disbursement" where money moved in the opposite direction – funds were pulled back from your account rather than paid out to it. This usually happens because of refunds, chargebacks, or fees that outweighed any sales in that batch. These are shown in red in your report so they are easy to spot.
Statement Billing Entry
A specific ledger entry representing a processing or merchant fee charged by the payment processor, separate from your regular card transactions.
Cash Accounting Method
The processor's method for recording merchant fees. Usually, a fee is recorded entirely within one disbursement, which makes reconciliation easy. But sometimes the debit and credit recording for a fee is split between two different disbursements instead.
Example – a $100 monthly merchant fee, split across two disbursements:
Disbursement 1 nets to ($180) – ($280) from your transactions, plus the $100 fee, recorded here as pending income.
Disbursement 2 nets to $650 – $750 from your transactions, minus that same $100 fee, now deducted from the pending income as it officially posts to your account.
This does not change the total amount of fees you are assessed – the apparent discrepancy is just a timing difference in how cash accounting records the fee, not an error in your data.
Debit Entry
The disbursement where a merchant fee is deducted from the pending income as it officially posts to your account. In the example above, that is the $100 subtracted from Disbursement 2.
Credit Entry
The disbursement where that same fee first shows up, recorded as pending income and folded into the transactions there to balance things out. In the example above, that is the $100 added into Disbursement 1.