Every Nigerian fintech integration eventually collides with the same wall: three sources of truth that don't agree with each other. Flutterwave's dashboard says a transaction cleared. Your bank statement shows the settlement. Your own ledger — the one your accountant actually trusts — says something else entirely.
We've been building payment integrations across Flutterwave, Moniepoint, and a handful of virtual-account providers for two years now. The lesson isn't glamorous: the hard problem isn't accepting the payment. It's reconciling the payment.
Here's what usually happens. A customer pays via Flutterwave. The webhook fires successfully. Your app credits the customer's account. So far so good. But four hours later, Flutterwave's settlement file arrives and shows a different amount because of a fee reversal you didn't know about. Or the same transaction appears twice because of a retry. Or — this one happens more often than you'd think — the webhook never fired because your server was briefly unreachable, so the payment succeeded but you don't know about it.
The fix isn't a library. It's a discipline:
- Every webhook writes to an inbox table, not directly to your accounting ledger. The inbox is the raw truth of what the payment provider said. Your ledger is what you believe, after reconciliation.
- Every morning, a scheduled job fetches the settlement file and diffs it against your inbox. Discrepancies raise an alert — usually to Telegram — with the transaction reference and a suggested resolution.
- Never trust the webhook alone. Always cross-check against the settlement file. Providers reconcile at their own cadence, not yours.
Our AandA Smart BI platform runs this reconciliation loop nightly for every AandA transaction. Last month it caught three duplicate credits worth a combined ₦280,000 that would have otherwise silently rotted the ledger. That's not glamorous engineering. It's the boring discipline that keeps a fintech-adjacent business honest.
The tech companies that will win the next five years in Nigerian payments aren't the ones building the flashiest checkout UX. They're the ones taking the reconciliation problem seriously.
If you're building something payments-adjacent and this sounds familiar, get in touch. We've made most of the interesting mistakes already.