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Comment by Semitangent | Hacker News Reader

Can someone help me understand the premise of this article? I think the goal here is to map the internal books of a business to their bank account, but I have never seen the kind of "grouping" the article seems to assume as given. In which scenarios do these groupings happen? If there are several customers, there will be different invoices and therefore separate payments. Why would the bank just throw them together, thereby creating the problem this article is trying to solve? I'm asking from Germany, in case this is one of these Europe-US kinds of differences.

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A mundane example is iTunes purchases.

If you buy something for $0.99 today, they won't bill you immediately. If you buy another $0.99 item tomorrow, you'll get a consolidated charge for $1.98. You would need to do something like this to link the $1.98 to your app/song purchases.

The reason for this is that credit card processing often costs a flat service charge + a percentage of the bill: Stripe is 30 cents + 2.9% right now. The flat portion dominates for small charges, so you'd want to combine them if at all possible. (Apple certainly gets a better rate...but also has a scale where small savings add up).

But even then, Apple knows exactly which purchases it consolidated into which payment, making the entire process trivial again

Yes but you don't have access to Apple's database, and therein lies the problem. Apple might send you a receipt that itemizes these things, or it might not. If you're a business you're dealing with 1000 different Apples all of whom have different policies about how granular their receipts will be, each with a different mechanism for you to access those receipts, and each making receipts available at different times.

Meanwhile you need to do a reconciliation for your company at the end of every period (e.g. the end of every day, every week, etc.) and you don't have time to wait around for all those receipts to be collected.

That’s how it happens, and let me add the problem occurs _between systems_.

In this example we have Apple’s charge (receipts) and the consumer’s bank withdrawals (statements). This example gives you an idea of a consumer’s purchases, which are simple to reconcile.

The post is about the Business to Business situation, which deals with greater volume and therefore more complex problems. The OP uses a toy example. If you’ve done financial reconciliation, then you will recognize the problem behind the trivial example.

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