How to Read Your Merchant Statement and Stop Overpaying

If you run a restaurant in Vancouver and accept card payments, you get a merchant statement every month. Most business owners glance at the total, wince, and file it away. That is exactly what your processor is counting on.

The Three Pricing Models

Interchange-plus is the most transparent model. You pay the actual cost that Visa or Mastercard charges plus a small fixed markup from your processor. Simple, honest, and easy to verify.

Flat rate means you pay the same percentage on every transaction regardless of card type. For restaurants processing over $10,000 per month, flat rate is almost always more expensive than interchange-plus.

Tiered or qualified pricing is where processors sort your transactions into qualified, mid-qualified, and non-qualified buckets. If you see these words on your statement, you are probably overpaying.

Red Flags to Look For

PCI non-compliance fee — if you see $19 to $99 per month for this, your processor is charging you for not completing a simple questionnaire. The fix usually takes 15 minutes online.

Non-qualified surcharges above 0.50% mean your processor is aggressively downgrading transactions to charge you more.

Any fee with the word technology, regulatory, or compliance in it is usually pure markup dressed up to look like a pass-through cost.

Calculate Your Effective Rate

Take your total fees for the month and divide by your total processing volume, then multiply by 100. If you processed $30,000 and paid $870 in fees, your effective rate is 2.9%. For a restaurant with average tickets above $25, anything above 2.5% means you are overpaying.

The average restaurant on interchange-plus pricing with Blockpay processes at an effective rate between 1.8% and 2.3%. That difference adds up to $200 to $600 per month.

What to Do Next

Grab last month's statement and calculate your effective rate. If it is above 2.5%, you are leaving money on the table. Blockpay Innovations offers a free, no-obligation statement review. We will read your statement line by line and show you exactly what you would pay on interchange-plus pricing through Fiserv. Call us at (888) 831-2883 or visit blockpayinnovations.com.