Cleaning Up Merchant Services

Recently we were called into a very large organization to help them understand their books and assist with cleaning up their merchant services.  The CFO was new to the organization and was attempting to get her arms around everything she was seeing from a payments perspective.

Our first course of action was to begin by looking at their bank statement.  There were several fees from various vendors that looked to be duplicated and some fees that just didn’t make sense.  After making some phone calls to identify the charges we were finally able to identify what was going on.  They were basically paying for two credit card processors and a lease that they didn’t even have the terminal for anymore.  We identified over $150 monthly charges that they didn’t need to be paying for.

The second thing we did was to look at their existing setup and see if there were things we could improve upon.  We looked at how they accepted payments, where they accepted them, and then the processes in which they did this.  The discussions also included security of how they handled the cards and if they stored them as well as compliance and data breaches.  With the changing of hands from one CFO to another, it was a good time to look at the complete process especially from an independent outsider’s point of view.  Business owners know that they can depend on us for our industry experience and ability to provide an honest review and not a sales pitch and that’s just what we did.

In the end they were very appreciative for identifying the savings both on the monthly charges that were basically for nothing, but also because we were able to save them on their current processing fees as well.  We decided to write about this experience because we see it all too often.  Let’s face it, as business owners we just don’t have enough time.  Whether we are in the business taking care of day to day tasks or above the business trying to see what the future holds, we just don’t have enough time.  Simple tasks such as reviewing what is going through the checking account is one of those tasks that gets left behind.  In the example above this organization was paying on a lease that should have stopped about 18 months prior.  Unfortunately, lease companies don’t stop taking out their fees until you call and tell them to stop.  So a lease that should have only been 48 months turned into a 66 month lease.  We wrote this article because we hate to see this kind of stuff.  We love to be brought in as consultants to help in this area because we know that we have helped that organization.  It’s not about us and us selling that next customer, it’s about building relationships and helping businesses.  That’s what we do and we bring our 20 plus years of industry experience to the table.

For additional questions or for more information on this topic, feel free to reach out to us at 602-635-6494.