End-of-month spreadsheet reconciliation is a tax on your time — your agent should do it

The spreadsheet that lives in three tabs

Every operator running Paymob as their online payment gateway knows this file. It has a Paymob settlements export in one tab, a Shopify orders export in another, and a third tab full of VLOOKUP formulas that never quite match. Somewhere in that delta are the fees Paymob deducted, the refunds that didn't clear, the order that was paid twice, and the one that was marked paid in Shopify but never settled.

For a store doing 200 orders a month, this is a two-hour exercise. At 2,000 orders, it's a two-day exercise — if the person doing it is good at spreadsheets. If they're not, it's wrong.

The mismatch has real consequences. Paymob's settlement cycle means money sits in transit for days. If you're not reconciling, you don't know if this week's settlement matches this week's orders. An underpaid settlement could be a fee change, a chargeback you missed, or a payout error — but you won't know until the gap is large enough to notice without a spreadsheet.

What the workflow actually does

The Wassel blueprint runs on a schedule and on Paymob settlement events:

Every day at 9am, and on every Paymob payout event: fetch the Paymob transaction list for the period, fetch the matching Shopify orders, compare amounts, flag any order where the Paymob transaction amount differs from the Shopify order total by more than the expected fee, and write a summary report to the reconciliation table. Notify via WhatsApp if any mismatch exceeds 100 EGP.

What the agent does in practice:

• Paymob transactions for the period come in via the Paymob API — order reference, amount captured, fees deducted, settlement status.
• Shopify orders for the same period are fetched and matched by order ID, which Paymob stores as the merchant reference.
• The agent computes the expected Paymob fee for each transaction based on your rate (which you configure once in the blueprint). It flags the transaction if the actual deduction is materially different from the expected deduction.
• Mismatches go into a clean exception list — not a 2,000-row spreadsheet, but a table of the rows that actually need a human to look at them.
• Shopify orders marked paid but with no matching Paymob transaction are flagged separately. These are the ones that matter most — they could mean a failed webhook or an order marked paid manually by mistake.

Why it matters

1. You stop finding out about Paymob fee changes three months later. If Paymob adjusts its rate, the agent catches the delta on the first settlement it processes under the new rate.
2. Refunds that didn't land show up before the customer escalates. A refund initiated in Shopify that never cleared in Paymob stays on the exception list until it clears.
3. Month-end close goes from two days to twenty minutes. The ledger is built daily. By the time the month ends, you're reviewing a clean summary, not reconstructing the month from exports.
4. The reconciliation is auditable. Every matched pair, every exception, and every fee calculation is logged with timestamps. If an accountant or auditor asks how you arrived at a number, the answer exists in the database — not in whoever's memory did the spreadsheet last time.

What this does not replace

A workflow like this surfaces mismatches. It does not decide what caused them or what to do about them. When the agent flags that order #18445 has a 47 EGP gap between the Shopify total and the Paymob settlement, a human still needs to determine whether that's the Paymob fee, a partial refund, or an error worth chasing.

The value is not removing the accountant. The value is giving the accountant a list of twelve things to check instead of a 2,000-row spreadsheet to reconstruct from memory.

Copy this into your own agent

The blueprint needs two things to go live: your Paymob API key (private key, available from your Paymob business dashboard under Developers) and your configured Paymob transaction fee rate. Setup takes under ten minutes.

If your Paymob rate varies by transaction type — different rates for Visa/Mastercard versus Meeza versus BNPL — the blueprint supports a rate table instead of a single flat rate. Configure once. The agent applies the right rate per transaction type automatically.