What is Sonas Reconciliation?

Sonas is the world’s first all-in-one reconciliation solution designed specifically for parking revenues. 

What do we mean when we discuss reconciliation?

Well, for parking companies, there are multiple revenue streams, be that cash and card at parking devices, contactless options from third-party providers or online payments for permits and PCNs. 

Sonas creates an effective workflow for parking companies to record all revenue data, automatically reconcile, identify and resolve exceptions, and build automated, powerful reports.

With us so far?

Okay. So, your following statement may be, “We have no qualms with our processes. Everything works fine“.

‘Fine‘ being the keyword. Why would you want your revenue validation processes to be just ‘fine’. 

Unfortunately, some parking companies are resistant to change. Although your processes may be ‘fine’, are they time-consuming? Are they laborious, manual and prone to human error? Do they give the highest degree of accuracy? Do they provide you with transparency and allow you to make improvements? 

These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves. While the industry changes with innovative solutions entering the market, such as electric charging, cashless payment apps, and a wealth of consumer technology, why are parking providers still behind the times? Resistance to change. 

How can we remain competitive if we won’t adapt to our changing environment?

What Issues Does the Industry Face?

Some of the issues uncovered from speaking to other Parking providers are:

A Lack of Transparency with Their Cash Service Providers (CSP)

Outsourcing some services hosts a wealth of benefits. However, it also comes with a loss of control. When Sonas has spoken with others in the industry, it has become apparent that communication is often lacking between the parking provider and their cash service provider. This can be highly problematic as we rely on our CSP to provide us with an accurate position of our cash revenue. Yet, there is often missing documentation and data in communication, resulting in a lack of transparency and an inability to investigate issues. 

Inability to Validate Cashless Parking Revenues

Similarly to the last point, outsourcing functions is necessary but comes with risk. Speaking to many parking operators, we know that many are happy with the reconciliations and validations provided by their cashless payment providers. Although, they just seem to take their word as gospel. There are often no internal validation steps to ensure the revenue coming through from cashless payment providers is accurate. By no means do we insinuate malicious intent, but if there are any external system errors, how will we know? We won’t. Parking operators need an internal dataset to compare the incoming data from cashless payment providers to ensure accuracy and transparency. 

Complex Payment Networks 

As previously mentioned, parking operators have a complex payment network derived from increased demand for flexibility from consumers. Market intel has informed us that collating these datasets onto one platform can be manual and time-consuming. The additional challenge is to then reconcile and validate these multiple revenue streams. 

Building Reporting and Analytics

The previous points all come back to the same core issues, a lack of transparency, time-exhaustive and complexity. Now, considering these issues, how can we possibly have powerful reporting? We tend not to. 

Parking operators have informed us that there are severe difficulties pulling all the data from numerous sources into reporting. Data so disparate does not grant us the flexibility to identify trends and improve performance. 

How Can Sonas Improve Parking Revenues?

Not only does Sonas overcome the issues presented above, but our core benefits help you remain competitive. 

Opportunities to Increase Parking Revenues

Sonas’ Reporting and Analytics module provides visual graphs and tables showing trend analysis, KPI tracking and operational overviews. This module equips you with the tools to optimise machines and sites by identifying the highest revenue-generating activities you can capitalise upon. Retrospectively, you can also access valuable insights on underperforming locations and make strategic business decisions to minimise losses and improve efficiency. 

Additionally, Sonas seamlessly combines your cash and cashless revenues attributed to a single device or location. Utilising this automated function permits you greater transparency whilst reducing your workload. 

Decrease Costs 

Sonas’ consolidated platform gives you the advantage of automation. All reconciliations are instantaneous. Simply upload the data, and Sonas does the rest, saving your team time and minimising human error. Increased accuracy reduces costs as exceptions are more visible and costly mistakes decrease. 

Typically multiple processes are involved in reconciliation, yet teams are disconnected. Consequently, Sonas provides communication points between departments and external parties to improve productivity and achieve resolutions rapidly. 

Furthermore, physical infrastructure costs are reduced through global access to the cloud, supporting remote working.