---
title: "First year operational tasks"
description: "An overview of the key reporting use cases for reconciliation to prioritize in your first year of operation."
url: "https://docs.adyen.com/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus"
source_url: "https://docs.adyen.com/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus.md"
canonical: "https://docs.adyen.com/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus"
last_modified: "2026-06-01T15:33:15+02:00"
language: "en"
---

# First year operational tasks

An overview of the key reporting use cases for reconciliation to prioritize in your first year of operation.

[View source](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus.md)

This section describes key reporting use cases for embedded payment offerings, helping your platform proactively manage reporting to prevent costly and avoidable delays. It outlines essential use-cases, identifies their end-users, and specifies who should be involved in building them. The goal is to provide a clear roadmap for financial reporting and reconciliation within the first year of an embedded payments offering.

*Reporting* and *reconciliation* are key to building an embedded payments offering.

* Reporting involves generating financial statements and other reports that summarize financial activity. These reports provide a clear picture of a company's financial health.

* Reconciliation is the process of comparing different sets of financial records to ensure they match. It's about verifying the accuracy of financial data by checking for discrepancies. For example, bank reconciliation involves comparing a company's internal records of cash transactions with the bank's records.

You use reports for reconciliation tasks, which is why the terms are grouped together.

## Key stakeholders and their needs

You have key stakeholders at both the platform level and at the platform-user level. These stakeholders need to consume balance platform reports to reconcile their balance sheets, understand their business costs, determine profits and losses, and determine how to price their products and services.

### Your platform

**Product team**

* Develops and maintains features that accurately and efficiently handle financial reporting and reconciliation processes for their specific industry.

The product team, often led by a Head of Payments, may own the profit and loss statement of an embedded payments offering and is responsible for commercial strategy. This includes accurately determining the cost structure to set pricing.

**Finance team**\
Manages the company's financial health, including budgeting, forecasting, accounting, and financial reporting.

* Reconciles revenue and fees with Adyen's reports and invoices
* Monitors cash flow and analyzing payment data (for example, refunds, chargebacks)
* Compares settlement reports with internal records, typically on a weekly/monthly basis
* Prepares financial statements and assists with audits.

### Your users

The stakeholders of your platform are **Small and Medium-sized Business (SMB)** users. Their tasks are usually broken down into the following categories.

**Daily tasks:**

* review detailed financial reports (for example: general ledger, accounts payable/receivable, profit and loss, and cash flow), to assess business performance
* maintain financial records and resolve discrepancies where necessary (For example: refund recognized as revenue)
* monitor key financial metrics for decision-making

**Periodic tasks (may be assisted by an external accountant):**

* review and reconcile finances, often monthly and annually
* prepare and file tax returns
* review and analyze financial statements
* compare bank statements with internal records of payment transactions and fees

## Define and align on requirements early

For embedded payments, reporting and reconciliation are a core product feature that is often overlooked. Building for these use cases seems like a daunting task, requiring specialized knowledge and tools. Financial transactions can be highly complex, involving multiple pricing models, funds flows, currencies and transaction statuses.

In addition, technical and financial teams are often insufficiently aligned. Developers may not fully grasp the implications of a seemingly minor data inconsistency on financial reports, while financial analysts might struggle to understand the technical challenges of integrating disparate data sources.

This lack of cross-functional communication can lead to reporting and reconciliation being seen as "someone else's problem". These gaps often surface when an embedded payments offering is already live and financial teams start worrying about potential financial risks, errors, and compliance issues. Solving for these requirements retrospectively is cumbersome and ultimately leads to delays in scaling your offering.

Your finance team should be involved early on for effective requirements gathering and education. Depending on the implementation and the level of granularity, your product and engineering team should be involved as well.

## Next steps

[required](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-level-reporting)

[Platform-level reporting](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-level-reporting)

[Read about reporting processes you should prioritize for insights into your platform's business.](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-level-reporting)

[required](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-user-level-reporting)

[User-level reporting](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-user-level-reporting)

[Read about reporting processes you should prioritize for your users to help them understand their profits and costs.](/platforms/reconciliation-use-cases/first-year-focus/platform-user-level-reporting)
