Every quarter, payments teams brace for the same battle: gather the data, clean the data, fix the formats, chase the exceptions—then somehow get the Mastercard QMR or Visa GOC report submitted on time.
Despite being essential to card scheme compliance and operational health, QMR and GOC reporting remains weighed down by legacy tech, data complexity and upstream inefficiencies.
In our 2025 Card Scheme Reporting Survey, UK payments companies said they spend an average of 142 hours per year preparing Mastercard and Visa scheme submissions. For companies managing both, that figure jumps to 184 hours—nearly a full working month.
Why is it still this hard?
The real bottlenecks aren’t in the reports. They’re in the process
QMR and GOC reports themselves are just the final output. The inefficiencies begin much earlier—with messy data, siloed systems and manual workflows.
Our research found three main culprits:
- Exception handling was the biggest time sink, cited by 33%
- Data collection followed closely at 30%
- Reconciliation rounded out the top three at 29%
When every file arrives in a different format, from a different processor, with its own quirks and missing fields, the real work begins long before the report does. Teams are forced to chase down fragmented data across departments, manually enrich and validate incomplete records and spend hours aligning mismatched fields just to reach a submission-ready state.
By the time the QMR or GOC file is finally generated, most of the effort has already been spent cleaning up the inputs. It’s no wonder reporting deadlines often feel like fire drills.
Excel isn’t helping
Despite the rise of specialised reporting platforms, 44% of organisations still rely on spreadsheets—partially or exclusively—to manage QMR or GOC reporting. While Excel offers flexibility, it also creates:
- Poor version control
- Manual data entry risk
- Limited scalability
- Formatting inconsistencies
- Weak audit trails
Put simply: Excel was never designed for regulated financial submissions. And it clearly wasn’t built for the complex, multi-currency data environments that payments companies now operate in.
The reconciliation link
One of the most under-recognised factors in scheme reporting inefficiencies is the state of reconciliation.
Clean reporting starts with clean data. And clean data starts with reconciled records.
But many payments teams still treat reconciliation as a standalone task—disconnected from the wider reporting function. This creates friction, duplication and increased risk as the same data is handled multiple times across different tools and teams.
When reconciliation is incomplete, reporting becomes a game of guesswork. That’s a gamble no regulated business can afford to take. It’s why automated reconciliation software is increasingly seen not just as a time-saver, but as a foundational component of the reporting workflow.
What automation really solves
To get scheme reporting under control, payments teams need more than faster templates or better spreadsheets. They need end-to-end automation that starts at the source and finishes at submission.
Modern reporting platforms—especially those built with automated reconciliation in mind—help to:
- Ingest and validate multi-source data at scale
- Standardise formats to match Mastercard and Visa requirements
- Handle currency conversions and FX rate alignment
- Flag and route exceptions early, before they delay a report
- Create an audit trail that supports internal sign-off and regulatory review
And the benefits are clear: in our survey, companies cited data accuracy (45%), compliance (39%) and cost-effectiveness (39%) as the top reasons they’re either implementing or considering automation.
Rethinking reporting from end to end
Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC reporting isn’t just a quarterly scramble—it’s a direct reflection of how well payments data is managed, reconciled and aligned.
As scheme requirements become more detailed, the old patchwork processes no longer scale. What was once a tolerated inefficiency is now a threat to compliance, operational clarity and team productivity.
The real opportunity isn’t just to automate the output. It’s to streamline the entire journey—from raw data to report-ready.
That starts with integrated reconciliation.
It continues with consistent data logic.
And it ends with submissions that don’t require fire drills to meet the deadline.
Final thoughts
QMR and GOC reporting will never be optional. But it can be radically simpler.
By connecting reconciliation software to a purpose-built reporting engine, payments teams can eliminate manual clean-up, reduce risk and spend less time fighting with formats—and more time focused on strategy.
If your team is still wrestling with spreadsheets and rushing to meet scheme deadlines, it’s time to move beyond short-term fixes. The future of card scheme reporting is fully automated, auditable and always-on.
Ready to see how Kani can take your Mastercard QMR and Visa GOC reporting to the next level?
