GGR reconciliation across game providers

Gross gaming revenue is a simple number: stakes minus payouts. Reconciling it across a dozen game studios is not simple at all, and most finance teams in iGaming spend the first week of every month proving it. This article explains where the differences come from and describes a process that turns reconciliation from a monthly project into a daily check.

Why the numbers differ

The operator's wallet and the studio's game server both record every round, but they record different things at different moments.

• Timing: a round that starts at 23:59:58 and settles at 00:00:03 belongs to different days on the two systems. Multiply by time zones and month ends.
• Rollbacks: a round cancelled by the studio after a timeout may have been debited on the wallet and reversed later. If the reversal lands after the reporting cut, the two sides disagree.
• Free rounds and bonus stakes: the studio counts a free-round spin as a stake at the nominal value; the wallet records no cash debit. Whether bonus-money stakes count as GGR depends on the contract.
• Currency: the studio invoices in euros at its own rate; the wallet records rounds in the player's currency. Rate and rounding differences appear on every line.
• Jackpot contributions and progressive payouts: some studios deduct contributions from stakes before computing GGR; others report them separately.
• Unfinished rounds: a live table hand open at the cut-off exists on the studio side and not yet on the wallet.

None of these are errors. They are definitions, and each studio applies its own.

The manual process and why it fails

The typical process is: download each studio's monthly report, export wallet transactions, align columns in a spreadsheet, and investigate every difference above a threshold. It fails for two reasons. The differences are discovered a month after they occur, when the underlying transactions are hard to trace. And the work scales with the number of studios, so adding content makes closing slower.

A process that works

Reconcile daily, at round level, automatically.

First, ingest every studio's round data as it arrives (most studios expose a round API or daily file) and normalise it into one schema: round id, game, player, stake, payout, currency, timestamps, status.

Second, match rounds to wallet transactions by the identifiers both sides share. Every seamless wallet call carries a round id and a transaction id; the match rate should be above 99.9%.

Third, classify the unmatched remainder by cause: timing, rollback, free round, unfinished round, missing. Only the last category is a real exception. The others are expected and can be explained by rule.

Fourth, aggregate matched rounds to GGR per studio, game, market and currency using one set of definitions that you also apply to the studio's invoice. At month end, the invoice comparison becomes a check of definitions, not a hunt for rounds.

What to agree with studios

Two things in the contract save weeks a year: the definition of GGR (whether bonus stakes and free rounds are included, how jackpot contributions are treated) and the exchange rate source and timing. With those agreed, the remaining differences are timing and rollbacks, which the daily process explains automatically.

How SlotCore does it

SlotCore's reconciliation service ingests round data from every studio on the network, matches it against the seamless wallet ledger continuously, and shows matched, explained and exceptional rounds in the back office with under five minutes of delay. GGR is computed once per studio, game and market with the definitions agreed in the SlotCore contract, so the monthly SlotCore invoice and the operator's own figures come from the same ledger. Finance sees one report rather than one per studio, and the monthly close becomes a review of exceptions that were flagged the day they happened.