Platform-level reporting

The following use-cases for platform reporting are designed to help your platform's product and finance teams view accounting reports for common reconciliation purposes.

Monthly profitability

Job to be done: Reconcile total revenue with total costs

Your embedded payments offering's profitability demonstrates its success, justifies further development resources and acts as a general indicator for health and significance of the revenue stream.

Content overview

The monthly profitability from your embedded payments offering is reflected in your Liable balance account. The commission earned on every transaction is allocated to the liable balance account, as are the costs (see Monthly Invoice Reconciliation for more details). To be able to perform cash reconciliation, any other adjustments on the liable account should also be taken into account, such as internal transfers between other accounts or invoice deductions. Finally, you can add up all the payouts from the liable account to your (third party) bank account to get revenue. Alternatively, if you have a scheduled payout enabled on the liable account, you can find these payouts by filtering for the Liable Account in the Payout Report.

When reconciling the first and last day of each month, keep in mind that - depending on your configured payout speed - payouts may arrive a day after the payout was initiated and the corresponding costs were incurred.

The difference between the sum of all payouts from the liable accounts, i.e. total revenue, and the total costs on the Adyen invoice, i.e. total costs, is an initial indication of your embedded payments offering's profitability.

Recommendation for how to build

If scheduled payouts are enabled on the liable account, filter the Payout Report for your Liable Account and use the sum of all payouts initiated during your specified period. The report is a csv-file that includes all payouts processed on your platform on a given day including the transactions that make up those payouts. Enable automatic generation and set up ingestion pipelines to operate this reconciliation process at scale.

Alternatively, the Balance Platform Accounting Report contains all events that impacted monthly profitability when filtered on the Liable Account and filtering the value date to the period that is being reconciled.

Transaction-level profitability

Job to be done: Identify profitability of a transaction by reconciling collected commission with incurred fees
As a platform that offers embedded payments, you want to understand which transactions result in a profit and which ones result in a loss. You use this information to optimize your pricing model. You will want to see real-time monetization of your transactions, as well as how different types of transactions translate into profitability.

Content overview

Individual Transactions
Create a report for the fees incurred for specific transactions.

Example template for a transaction-level profitability

Types of Transactions
Group transactions together to identify profitability for different transaction types. For example, Payment Method, Payment Method Variant.

Example template for a grouped transaction-level profitability (day)

Recommendation for how to build

You need the Balance Platform Accounting Report and the Payment Accounting Report. The Psp Reference in the Payment Accounting Report reconciles with the Payment Psp Reference in the Balance Platform Accounting Report.

Your commission can be found in the Balance Platform Accounting Report. Filter the AccountHolder or BalanceAccount column for the code that matches your Liable Account. Then filter the Status column for captured. Each Payment Psp Reference will have two records. The Description column indicates which record relates to the payment fees you incurred, as the entry will start with "Payment Fee for ...", this entry will have a negative value in the Amount column. The other entry should display a positive value in the Amount column; this is the commission you made on this transaction.

Processing Fees are not included in the Balance Platform Accounting Report. If you need these for your reconciliation use-case, refer to the Payment Accounting Report; look for the Processing Fee column for the same Psp Reference.

Alternatively, you can pull all transaction fees from the Payment Accounting Report. Take the sum of Scheme Fees, Interchange Fees and Processing Fee for a Psp Reference. Please note there will be multiple records for a Psp Reference to reflect the different stages of the payment lifecycle. Make sure to filter the Record Type column for SentForSettle and Received.

This analysis only includes transactional fees. Fees that do not directly relate to a transaction are excluded; for example, non-transactional scheme fees, payout fees, and KYC fees. We recommend to account 5 USD/EU/GBPR per physical location or 15 USD/EUR/GBP for per e-commerce User. Reach out to your account manager if you have more than 50 locations or when your average user transacts more than 1 million in annual e-commerce volume.

User-level profitability

Job to be done: Identify profitability of a platform user by reconciling total collected commission with total fees incurred for that user
As a platform that offers embedded payments, you want to understand the profitability of serving each of your users. You want to understand how much of a profit you are making on different users to optimize your pricing model accordingly.

Content overview

Example template for User-level profitability (monthly)

Recommendation for how to build
We recommend to generate these insights on a monthly basis.

User-aggregated Revenues can be found in the Balance Platform Accounting Report. Filter transactions for the specified month.

Start by grouping PSP Payment References by AccountHolder. For payments, you are filtering for the status captured. Take the sum of the number of entries to get to Transaction Count for that account holder.

• For internal transfers, bank transfers and fees, you will want to include booked.
• Refunds can be identified through status refunded.

You need the table of PSP Payment References mapped per AccountHolder. For each PSP Payment Reference, you must add together the amount credited to your user's account and the amount credited to your liable account.

Each PSP Payment Reference will have three line items with status captured. You can include a reference field in your request. This reference is a unique identifier that you create for the transaction. This value will then be carried through to the description column in the Balance Platform Accounting Report, helping you to reconcile transactions in your internal systems.
It is recommended to add a hardcoded prefix to the reference-column or the description-column to indicate which transfer is which. For example, "USER_1234..." and "LIABLE_1234..."

• For Volume take the sum of those entries together
  • Account for refunds by including entries with status refunded
• For Commission take the sum of the entries credited to your Liable Account

User-aggregated Costs are easily accessible through the Balance Platform Fee Report. For each AccountHolder, calculate the Fees through the Fee Amount column. Optionally, you can exclude certain Fee Types or Fee Names (for example, don't include chargebacks).

For Profitability, deduct a user's Total Fees from the Commission collected from that User. You can calculate the User's Effective Rate by dividing the Profit by the User's.

Recommendations
The Balance Platform Fee Report allows for easy reconciliation of incurred fees to individual Users. Using the Balance Platform Accounting Report is possible, but requires more effort and less granularity in fee types.

This analysis only includes transactional fees. Fees that do not directly relate to a transaction are excluded; for example, non-transactional scheme fees, payout fees and KYC fees. We recommend to account 5 USD/EU/GBPR per physical location or 15 USD/EUR/GBP for per e-commerce user. Reach out to your account manager if you have more than 50 locations or when your average user transacts more than 1 million in annual e-commerce volume.

Monthly invoice reconciliation

Job to be done: Match the costs of your embedded payments offering to the items on your Adyen invoice

When reconciling your monthly invoice, you want to accurately connect every line item on the invoice to the specific transactions, fees, and services that occurred within the embedded payments offering.

This process ensures that internal records and billing to your users are correct, preventing discrepancies, and providing a clear understanding of payments-related costs.

Content overview

Your main invoice will be the Payment Processing Invoice. This invoice includes the costs related to all transactions processed on your platform over the course of the invoice period.

Other important fees related to your embedded payments include:

• KYC Service fees: Adyen balance platform fee for sub-merchant KYC and verification services.
• Payout Service fees: Adyen balance platform fee for external funds transfers.
• Non-transactional scheme fees: fixed or periodic charges levied by payment networks, independent of the volume or value of transactions processed (For example, Visa, FanF, and Mastercard Merchant Location Fee):

Recommendation for how to build
You can reconcile different parts of your invoice as follows:
Follow the process to reconcile the costs related to your transactions in the invoice reconciliation guide.
Other costs you need to reconcile include:

• KYC Service fees: you can reconcile these costs through the invoice (lines with "KYC").
• Payout Service fees: can be reconciled with the Balance Platform Accounting Report. Filter for the invoice period and select the number of events of type = bankTransfer and status = booked.
• Non-transactional scheme fees: (for example, Visa, FanF, and Mastercard Merchant Location Fee). These fees are passed through by Adyen and assessed by Visa and Mastercard.

You can read more about balance platform fees in reports and fee types.

In the Settlement details report, look for a record with the Journal Type of InvoiceDeduction. The amount in this line should correspond to the total amount due on your monthly invoice. This confirms that the total amount from the invoice has been debited or credited from your settlement.