25 March 2026
When gateways and ledgers disagree
Authorisation success in the gateway is not revenue. Audit the handoff where finance and product use different truths.
Product dashboards celebrate authorisation rates. Finance closes on settled funds. Between those views sits capture timing, partial refunds, and voided auths that never touch the bank.
Card processing audits should sample both systems with the same transaction IDs. Disagreement is a control finding, even when neither team feels wrong.
Name a single source of truth for merchant reporting and write the exceptions that are allowed to diverge. Silence here becomes board-level surprise later.
Hong Kong merchants operating multi-currency stacks feel this gap earlier — fix the definition before adding another processor.