Android In-App Purchase transfer reconiliation

Question

We have recently been tasked with adding In-App Purchases to our Android mobile application. We have completed this and have started testing small purchases internally in our production environment prior to release.

We're successfully performing the purchase and storing the result in our back-end database. We have a service that contacts the Google API daily to query about the PaymentState for the transaction.

Today our first test purchase changed to 1 (Payment Received).

We have not yet received the money transfer in our bank account, but it's probably on the way.

Our question is, once the PaymentState has changed to 1, how can we reconcile this with our bank account?

Our finance department doesn't like the sound of just trusting that we got the money. We want to ensure that each payment is accounted for in cash.

How are others accomplishing this?

Thanks

Answer 1

Does your bank offer any interface for a computer to interact with your bank account?

In Germany, almost all banks support either the Home Banking Computer Interface (HBCI) or it's successor the Financial Transaction Service (FinTS) to connect arbitrary computer programs with the bank account and pretty much provide all services available on their web-based online banking sites via those interfaces as well.

With such an interface you could then check the transactions on your bank account programmatically and simply check if the transaction reference provided by Google has already arrived on your bank account.

Without knowing where you're based and what your bank is / what interface they provide, it's hard to provide more details. (There are multi-national/somewhat universal electronic interface standards for how banks communicate with one another, but these are usually not open to the customers and most likely don't provide the required data about one account's individual transactions)