Checks that every card and UPI sale at a chain's outlets reached the bank
TL;DR Salematch is reconciliation software for restaurant and retail chains with 5–60 outlets. It matches every bill in the POS against the settlement reports of each card terminal, UPI provider and gateway, then against the bank credit, and flags sales that never arrived, wrong fees and stuck refunds. Chains pay a monthly fee per outlet.
A mid-sized chain in India rarely uses one payment provider. An outlet might have a bank's card terminal, two UPI QR codes from different providers and a gateway for online orders, each with its own settlement report, timing and fee.
Then failed payments add to the mess. Under RBI rules, a UPI payment debited from a customer without merchant confirmation can take up to T+5 days to reverse, and the same applies to a card swipe that printed no charge slip[1]. Fees differ by method too - one large gateway's standard plan charges a 2% platform fee on cards and on UPI, plus 18% GST on that fee[2]. Can an accounts team with a spreadsheet check every line across 30 outlets? No chance, so short settlements and wrong fees quietly go unnoticed.
What it does, in regulatory terms: reconciliation software only. Salematch never collects, holds or routes payments, so it does not act as a payment aggregator, which would need RBI authorisation[3]. It reads settlement files the merchant already receives, with the merchant's consent.
Each night, Salematch pulls the day's bills from the POS and the settlement files from each provider, by API where one exists and by email or upload where not. It matches bill to transaction to bank credit, then sorts the gaps - missing settlements, fees above the agreed rate, refunds not processed, duplicate charges and cash recorded as UPI. The finance head gets a short list each morning with the evidence attached, ready to send to the provider.
The seed pitched smart payment routing and a unified POS, and I've dropped both. Routing is a contest won by large payment orchestrators[4], and restaurant POS is crowded, with one leading POS vendor alone citing 1,50,000+ businesses[5]. Mid-sized chains still lack someone checking that the money arrived.
The chain's finance head or owner pays a monthly fee per outlet, with a setup fee for each new provider connected, both my assumptions to test. Today the alternative is an accounts executive matching spreadsheets, or a horizontal reconciliation tool, one of which counts dessert and beverage chains among its customers[6]. Salematch has to win by knowing the Indian provider formats out of the box.
Chains have stacked payment providers as UPI grew, and each provider sends a different report. The RBI failed-transaction timelines[1] mean a chain can wait up to five days to know if a reversal was handled. Horizontal tools now sell reconciliation templates for the big Indian gateways[6], which shows chains are starting to pay for this work.
I found no public figure for payment reconciliation spending by Indian chains. The narrowest evidence is customers - one horizontal tool lists food and retail chains among its users[6]. A large orchestrator's claim of $1 Tn+ in annual payment volume[4] is global, adjacent context, not your market.
Payment orchestrators sell three-way reconciliation to large food-delivery and airline enterprises[4]. Horizontal reconciliation tools price plans by rows and data sources[6]. Restaurant POS vendors run billing and stop there[5]. The gap is a product built only for multi-outlet chains with several in-store providers, that knows each provider's settlement format and fee card.
| Difficulty | Moderate (36/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹50–95 L |
| Time to launch | 5–7 months |
Matching logic is well understood. The real work is in the long tail of formats, because every bank terminal, UPI provider and POS exports data differently and changes it without notice. You also need a customer-success team that can explain a mismatch to an accountant, because one false alarm costs trust.
No payments licence here, because Salematch only reads files the merchant already gets.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't let AI mark a gap as resolved or file a dispute on its own. One false alarm costs trust, so a person confirms each claim.
Want to work out the AI layer for Salematch? Talk to Yash →
Here's what can go south -
I think this is a good fit for a founder who has run finance or payments operations at a restaurant or retail chain. If you want to build payment rails then this isn't it. Prove first that across ten chains a 90-day back-audit finds recoverable money at least three times Salematch's annual price.
Plan for roughly ₹50–95 L, mostly on connectors for each provider's format and a customer-success team.
No payments licence, since you never collect or hold money. You still need DPDP compliance for customer data in settlement files.
Yes, multi-provider chains exist everywhere. Check local data protection law and card-data rules, then learn each country's provider formats.
The free Salematch validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the payments and data-protection checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for finance heads, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Salematch or something close to it? The make-or-break work is proving recovered money fast enough that chains keep paying, and that's the kind of thing I help founders with. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.