Every month, Merchant Service Providers will send out a statement to their customers.
Some companies will send out statements in the mail, some via email and some providers even have online up to date real time tracking available for merchants on line. No matter which way the information is being gathered by the merchant, these statements are useful to a business owner for many reasons.
Firstly, the information provided on a merchant’s monthly statement, is a general summary of the activity for the month and is often accompanied by a complete breakdown of each transaction by date of occurrence. It is not only the transaction details and expense which make up this monthly bill; the statements will cover every aspect of the services being billed by the providers and credit card processors.
Processing Fees: Make up the larger chunk of the information provided on the statements. The processing fees will break down how many transactions were accepted, and at what the merchant paid to accept those transactions. For example, the Debit usage, let’s say the merchant processed 200 transactions, and the cost per transaction is .08 cents. The statement will show the merchant being billed for 16.00 dollars worth of debit transactions. Credit cards show the exact same breakdown however, most Credit Card transactions now are broken down even further by the processors, as the rate of processing will change with they type of card being used. The Statement will show this billing in a summary (usually broken down to Debit, Visa, Master card, American Express and other) for the month and how much the merchant is being billed. Statements will usually be 4-5 pages, although the complete summary is only one page, the per date/transaction can run on for quiet a few pages!
Billing Fees: so the remainder of the fees showed on the statement that do not fit into the Processing Fees category, can essentially be summed up as Merchant Processor Fees. These fees will be made up of anything not related directly to transactions. For Example, whatever a business owner is paying to Rent or Lease the terminal would be reflected on the statement. What ever the processor maybe charging in addition to the Processing Fees such as a deposit fee, usage fee, sometimes you will see a Monthly Services Fee, any way it is put, the Merchant Service Providers are essentially billing the merchant’s for the services, in order to keep the whole thing running… like customer and technical support and service and every thing else associated with running the Merchant Services in general.
A business owner should keep their monthly statements and file them accordingly at years end, this way all items are accounted for, and can be easily referenced in the future. Statements, if not being used should be shredded or carefully placed as often times there is very personal and sensitive information reflected on these pages, which can be very useful to fraudsters and potential hackers.
