Reporting·June 27, 2026·7 min read

Reconciliation is not a finance problem — it's an operations problem.

By the time discrepancies reach the finance team, most of the evidence is already gone. Operations owns the trail.

Reconciliation gets treated as a month-end finance task, but by then the evidence has often decayed. Postback logs have rolled over, buyer dashboards have refreshed, and the operator who made the routing change is on vacation.

Operations owns the evidence trail: platform logs, delivery records, postback receipts, change logs. Whoever runs those systems has to run reconciliation with them — not hand a spreadsheet to finance and hope.

In practice this looks like a defined weekly cadence per buyer and publisher, dispute-ready evidence retained on a written schedule, and adjustments documented in the same log as the original activity. Finance closes the month against a clean, defensible position.

The operation that runs reconciliation this way rarely loses discrepancy disputes. The operation that does not, quietly leaks margin every quarter and only finds out at close.