Glossary · Term
The process of matching publisher-earned amounts against buyer-billed amounts to produce a single trustworthy payout ledger.
Definition
Reconciliation is the accounting layer of a network. It takes buyer-side revenue records, subtracts platform fees, applies contracted publisher percentages, adjusts for rejections and clawbacks, and produces the numbers on every publisher's next payout. The math is not hard; keeping the inputs correct across platforms is.
Why it matters
Reconciliation errors either underpay publishers — who eventually notice and leave — or overpay them, which is unrecoverable. Networks that reconcile weekly can catch buyer disputes before they compound; networks that reconcile monthly discover them after the payout ran.
How it fails in practice
The most common failure is running reconciliation from stale exports rather than live data, and doing it manually in a spreadsheet nobody but one person can update. When that person is unavailable, publishers are paid on the last export, and any change since then flows to the next month.
Related terms
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