San Francisco and Dublin based Stripe, which builds payment infrastructure for the internet, has announced that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Recko, a leading provider of payments reconciliation software for internet businesses.
Payments reconciliation is an accounting process that compares two or more sets of records—for example, a company’s internal sales log and their external bank statement—to confirm accuracy. Finance teams perform reconciliation to uncover discrepancies, avoid incorrect accounting, and understand a company’s financial health at a point in time. A retailer that has sold a $100 jacket would reconcile that purchase by matching the recorded sale on its website with the $100 payment reported by its payment processor and the $99 deposit (less a $1 processing fee) it receives to its bank account.
This manual process of correctly matching transactions is further complicated for fast-growing online businesses, which must also account for things like currency conversion, refunds, chargebacks, bundled bank deposits, and more, across thousands or millions of transactions in a given month. Recko automates key steps of reconciliation to relieve finance teams of a tedious and time-consuming process.
“Payments reconciliation shouldn’t be a mild headache that balloons into a migraine as a company grows—it should be an easy, highly automated process,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s Chief Product Officer. “Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management—from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping. With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health.”
As the latest addition to Stripe’s revenue platform, Recko removes barriers to seamless payments reconciliation by:
- Automating the collection of transaction data from financial systems and non-Stripe payment processors, including Excel or CSV attachments saved in emails.
- Accurately matching thousands of individual transactions with just a few clicks, saving finance teams countless hours of manual reconciliation tasks such as identifying which lump-sum deposit maps to which combination of individual sales.
- Accounting for currency differences, fees, refunds, and chargebacks that may not appear concurrently in financial records.
Allowing businesses to produce weekly, monthly, or quarterly reconciliation reports that highlight potential mistakes or discrepancies. - Exporting reconciliation reports to third-party tools and platforms that businesses use to understand their financial health.
The acquisition of Recko is the latest milestone in Stripe’s expansion beyond payments acceptance, bringing millions of users another tool to manage and grow their revenue alongside Stripe Revenue Recognition, Stripe Billing, Stripe Invoicing, and more.
“Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the GDP of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity,” commented Saurya Prakash Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Recko. “Internet businesses need new financial tools that can scale with their growth and automate the tasks required to produce an accurate picture of their financial health.”
Based in Bangalore, India, Recko has grown significantly since its founding in 2017, and currently counts leading internet businesses including Deliveroo, Meesho, PharmEasy, and more as customers. Recko’s team will join Stripe’s remote engineering hub, helping to build and scale Stripe’s products globally. This acquisition comes amid Stripe’s increased investment in India, including updated data locality architecture and rapid local hiring.
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Recko users can continue to use the company’s products directly.