Revenue leakage in a charging network is not usually theft. It is sessions that delivered energy and never produced a payment, and the reason it persists is that nobody is looking for something they never expected to arrive.
Reconciliation is the practice of making those gaps visible.
Three records that must agree
Every session should exist as a charger transaction record, a platform session record and a payment record. Reconciliation is confirming that each one has its counterparts and investigating those that do not.
Most networks compare two of the three, usually platform and payment, which misses the case where the charger delivered energy the platform never recorded.
Where gaps open
- Sessions delivered offline whose records never reached the platform.
- Sessions the platform holds with no payment attached, from a failed or reversed transaction.
- Payments with no matching session, from a start that failed after authorisation.
- Sessions with a start reading and no stop reading, so no billable quantity exists.
- Sessions billed at a tariff that was not in force when they occurred.
- Free or test sessions that were never marked as such.
Offline sessions are the largest single source
A charger that operates offline and stores transactions is only revenue-safe if those transactions arrive, are accepted, and are billed at the right tariff. Any break in that chain produces energy delivered and not charged for.
The specific failure worth checking is a platform that rejects backdated transactions outside a recent window. Those sessions are lost silently, and the charger believes it delivered them successfully.
Duplicates run the other way
A charger that resends after an uncertain acknowledgement can deliver the same transaction twice. Without duplicate detection, a driver is billed twice, which costs more in trust than the energy was worth.
Reconciliation should therefore look for both missing and duplicated records, because the same underlying mechanism causes both.
Make it a routine rather than an investigation
Reconciliation performed only when someone suspects a problem finds problems that are already months old. Performed on a schedule, with exceptions surfaced as a small list rather than a report nobody reads, it finds them while the evidence still exists.
The useful output is a count of unmatched records per period. A number that trends upward is a system problem; a number that stays near zero means the pipeline is intact.
Retain the evidence
Resolving an exception requires the underlying records: the message exchange, the meter readings, the payment reference. Platforms that store only outcomes make every exception a matter of judgement.
Retention period should be set against how long a dispute can plausibly arrive, which is usually longer than the default.