Reconciliation: the boring habit that finds money.
Nobody enjoys checking a settlement line by line. It is also the only reliable way to discover that you have been charged for returns that never arrived. Here is the method, and an honest note on when it stops working.
- Reconcile every cycle, not quarterly — claim windows close long before a quarterly review happens.
- Order by order, never totals. Offsetting errors hide perfectly inside a plausible total.
- You need three records: the settlement, your order log with weights, and your returns inward record.
- Short on time? Check exceptions only — returns, oversized deductions, unreferenced adjustments.
- Robnu does the full per-order pass every cycle automatically. Free while we figure out pricing.
This guide describes how to reconcile properly by hand. It works, it finds real money, and it becomes impossible to sustain past a certain volume. Both halves of that are worth being straight about.
Four checks, every order
For each order in the settlement period, ask four questions in sequence. They are ordered so that the cheapest checks eliminate the most orders first.
- Is it there at all? Compare your dispatched orders against the settlement. Missing orders are the least-noticed error because an absence does not draw the eye.
- Is the sale value right? Against what you listed and what the customer paid.
- Is each deduction justified? Commission at the right rate, shipping on the right weight, returns only where a parcel actually came back.
- Is it charged once? Duplicates split across two cycles are invisible unless you look for them specifically.
The five recoverable errors
Ranked by how often they appear in a typical small-seller settlement.
Wrong shipping weight
Freight billed on a weight above what you dispatched. See weight discrepancy.
Phantom return
Charged for a return that never physically arrived. You lose stock, sale and freight together. Needs your inward record to detect.
Duplicate deduction
The same shipment charged in two cycles. Only findable by searching the shipment ID across periods.
Missing order
Dispatched and delivered, absent from the settlement. Requires comparing against your own log, not reading the report.
Unwarranted penalty
An SLA penalty on an order you handed over on time. Your manifest is the counter- evidence.
Unclaimed TCS
Not an error, but money left behind. It is a credit you can claim at filing, and most small sellers never do.
The same checks, every cycle, without you
Nothing above is difficult. It is just relentless — the same four questions against every order, every cycle, forever, while also running the business. The realistic outcome is not bad reconciliation; it is reconciliation that stops happening.
Robnu is an agentic OMS. It holds the order log and dispatch weights as a by-product of running your operations, so when a settlement arrives it already has both sides of the comparison. It runs the full per-order pass, flags every line that does not reconcile, and prepares the claims — a rare approval click while fully-autonomous filing rolls out.
You sell. Robnu runs the rest — and makes sure every rupee is paid correctly.
Reconciliation, answered
It is the process of checking that what a marketplace paid you matches what it should have paid, order by order. That means confirming each sale appears, each deduction against it is justified, and the net figure is arithmetically correct. It is bookkeeping, but it is bookkeeping that routinely finds money.
Every settlement cycle, without exception. The argument is not thoroughness — it is claim windows. Dispute deadlines are short, so an error found during a quarterly review is frequently past the point where it can be raised. Reconciling late costs the same effort and recovers nothing.
Three records: the settlement report from the marketplace, your own order log including dispatch weights, and your inward record of returns actually received. The second and third are the ones sellers typically lack, and without them you can only verify that the marketplace's arithmetic is internally consistent — not that it is correct.
In rough order of frequency: shipping charges computed on the wrong weight, returns or RTOs charged where the parcel never arrived back, duplicate deductions across settlement periods, orders missing from the settlement entirely, and penalties applied to orders that were dispatched on time. All five are claimable when caught in the window.
No, and this is the most common shortcut that defeats the whole exercise. A total within your expected range can contain an overcharge on one order offset by a missing deduction on another. Both are errors, the total looks fine, and you find neither. Reconciliation only works order by order.
Roughly a few minutes per order if you are being honest about the checks. That is manageable at low volume and becomes untenable somewhere in the range of a few dozen orders a day — not because the work gets harder, but because the total time exceeds what any small team can give it consistently.
Check the exceptions rather than everything. Pull every order that involved a return or RTO, every order where the deduction looks unusually large relative to its value, and any adjustment without a clear order reference. That subset contains the large majority of recoverable errors for a fraction of the effort.
When the time it takes reliably exceeds the time you actually have — which shows up as cycles you skipped rather than cycles you did badly. A skipped reconciliation is not a small loss, because it means an entire settlement period of errors passed unchallenged and unrecoverable.