Why the bank never matches the card machine
Three things sit between a card sale and the money in your account:
- Commission. The bank keeps an agreed percentage of every card sale, so what arrives is less than what was rung up.
- Timing. Card money arrives after the sale, usually the next working day, and a weekend or a holiday stretches that.
- Batches. The machine's day and the shop's day do not always end at the same moment, so one deposit can hold parts of two days.
None of that is a problem. It only becomes one when the books pretend card money is cash in the drawer, or when the deposit is recorded as a single amount with the commission lost inside it.
How to record it properly
- A card sale is money the bank owes the shop. It is not in the drawer, so it must never be part of the drawer count at closing time.
- When the bank pays, record the full amount of those card sales as settled, the money that actually arrived in the bank, and the difference as card commission, an expense you can see.
- Keep a short list of card days that have not been settled yet. On a normal week it should never be longer than a day or two.
Done this way, the month's profit shows exactly what card payments cost you, and a missing settlement is noticed the next morning instead of at the end of the year.
Adding a surcharge is not allowed
Some shops add 2.5% or 3% when a customer pays by card, to cover the commission. In July 2025 the Central Bank of Sri Lanka's Director of Payments and Settlements made the position clear: merchants are not permitted to charge additional fees for card transactions, and the agreement a shop signs with its bank when it receives a card machine says so. A customer who is charged extra can complain to the bank that issued their card and ask for a refund.
The honest way to cover commission is in your prices and margins, not at the till. Good software helps here: once commission is recorded as its own expense, you can see what it really costs per month and price for it deliberately.
Split payments, done right
A customer pays 3,660 as 1,000 in cash and the rest by card. That bill puts 1,000 in the drawer and 2,660 into card money due from the bank, and it prints as one receipt. If your current system can only take one method per bill, cashiers invent workarounds, and those workarounds are where the day's count goes wrong.
You can try exactly this split in our live POS demo.
A weekly card check
- Card sales by day, from your own system.
- Deposits from the bank statement, matched to those days.
- Commission for the week, compared with the rate on your agreement.
- Any day still unsettled after two working days, followed up with the bank.
Source for the surcharge position: The Morning Telegraph, 23 July 2025, reporting the Central Bank of Sri Lanka's statement.