A processor says a payment settled. Your product ledger shows the customer balance and fee entries. The bank account still has no matching credit. None of those records is necessarily wrong, yet the payment is not reconciled.
The mistake is asking which system has the true status. Each system owns a different fact. Reconciliation belongs to the process that can compare those facts, preserve the mismatch and prove what happened at every boundary. A useful design sets invariants across the product ledger, the processor settlement record and the bank statement.
One payment creates three different facts
Your product ledger records the economic event the application accepted: a capture, refund, fee, reserve movement, chargeback or correction. It should preserve the customer-facing and accounting consequences even when an external provider changes later.
A processor owns another view. Its settlement data determines which transactions and adjustments entered a payout. Stripe, for instance, exposes immutable balance transactions and lets automatic payouts retain their association with the transactions they contain. Adyen's settlement details report includes settled payments, fees, corrections, payouts and a payout reference that can appear on the bank statement.
