Settlement operations checklist

01

Objective

Run recurring settlement operations with explicit separation between detection, policy confirmation, and treasury recognition—surfacing drift before period close.

02

Prerequisites

• Lifecycle enums documented per environment.
• Settlement checkpoints configured with owners.
• Dashboards or reports for stuck states (Paid without Confirmed, etc.).

03

Operational signals

• Growing count of manual lifecycle overrides.
• Increasing age of payments in intermediate states.
• Mismatch between provider plane totals and commerce fulfilled orders.

04

Decision points

• Which states auto-advance versus require human review.
• When to open exception queue versus wait for confirmations.
• Whether to throttle fulfillment during rail instability.

05

Escalation paths

• Operations → finance for recognition policy exceptions.
• Engineering → provider support for detection gaps.
• Treasury → compliance for high-value holds.

06

Failure modes

• Treating explorer visibility as Confirmed for all SKUs.
• Skipping checkpoint review during high volume.
• Collapsing async settlement into single paid flag.

07

Recovery patterns

1. Run settlement checkpoint audit on affected payment_ids.
2. Route ambiguous cases to exception taxonomy classes.
3. Communicate customer-visible delays with policy-backed language.
4. Update checkpoint config from drift root cause.