Electrum Full Reconciliation
The Back Office engine performs two-way reconciliation (also referred to here as recon) between parties to ensure that the view of transactions from either end is the same.
In an Enterprise Payments Channel solution, Electrum Back Office receives transaction information from your (the corporate client's) back-end processing system at the end of each processing day. Electrum also generates transaction information from the EPC processing engine, which represents the sponsor bank's view of each transaction. Electrum Back Office then compares the data from your system with the transaction information from the EPC processing engine, and assigns a reconciliation status to each transaction based on whether the data from your system agrees with the bank's view.
Getting Transaction Information into Electrum Back Office
Transaction records should be provided in an extract/mark-off file to Electrum for all transactions where you have received a payment notification (CreditTransferCompletion) from Electrum, regardless of whether the payment itself was successful or failed.
The following transaction details are used when Electrum Back Office reconciles your view with the bank's view:
- Transaction identifiers
- Transaction status (e.g., whether it was successful or declined)
- Transaction amounts and dates
The corporate client transaction records are provided to Electrum via transactions extract (also called mark-off) files. These files must be transferred to Electrum Back Office by dropping them into a dedicated AWS S3 bucket.
Electrum Back Office retrieves your transactions extract files from the dedicated AWS S3 bucket and merges the data, alongside the data from the Electrum payments engine, into the Back Office processing engine.
You can view Electrum's file specification here.
Matching Records that Belong to the Same Transaction
The Back Office engine uses predefined 'matching' fields to map corresponding transaction records provided by you and the EPC processing engine, so that the appropriate records can be compared with one another.
A matching field is one that helps to identify two transaction records that describe the same transaction.
The following table lists the specific matching fields that are used for each EPC scheme:
| BPP payment scheme | Matching Transaction Elements |
|---|---|
| PayShap | uetr (universal end-to-end transaction reference) |
Reconciling Transaction Records
Once the relevant records pertaining to the same transaction are matched, those records are then reconciled through comparison of specific 'reconcilable' fields.
Reconcilable fields are ones that ensure that two matching transaction records are in agreement about the outcome of a transaction.
The following table lists the specific reconcilable fields that are used for each EPC scheme:
| EPC Payment Scheme | Matching Transaction Elements |
|---|---|
| PayShap | Transaction amount, Transaction status |
Reconciliation Results
Using the above process, Electrum Back Office assigns a reconciliation status to each transaction:
- If all reconcilable fields of matched transaction records agree, then these transactions are considered to be matched.
- If one or more of the reconcilable fields of matched transaction records do not agree, then these transactions are considered to be partially matched.
- If a transaction contains only one record, and no corresponding record from the partner entity, then it is considered unmatched.
Reconciliation Reports
After reconciling all transactions for a given processing day, Electrum generates the following reconciliation reports:
Matched recon file: This file includes all transactions that were matched, i.e., where all matching keys were matched and where both the transaction amount and state were also matched.
Unmatched recon file: This file includes all transactions that were unmatched or partially matched. That is, these are transactions where either (A) one of the transaction records (from your or Electrum's systems), was not received so that no matching record could be found for the given transaction record, or (B) both transaction records for the transaction could be linked, but the transaction amount and/or the status values in these two records could not be reconciled.
These reports are made available to you via the same AWS S3 bucket that you used to supply your transactions extract file to Electrum.