What makes up a card processing bill?

Most card processing is sold on a percentage. It is the number quoted on the phone, the number written on the paperwork, and usually the only number a business remembers. It is also only one part of what leaves the bank account each month.

A merchant bill is normally a stack of separate charges: a percentage of what you take, something charged per transaction, the cost of the terminal itself, an account or service charge, and occasional administrative items. Two businesses on the same headline percentage can pay noticeably different amounts once all of that is added up, because their transaction profiles are different.

That is the reason a review starts with your own statement rather than a rate comparison. Until you know what the whole arrangement costs you, in your trading pattern, there is nothing meaningful to compare.

The wording varies between providers, and not every statement includes every line. Broadly, though, these are the categories worth identifying on your own paperwork.

The same price list produces different bills for different businesses, because the charges land in different proportions.

A business taking a small number of high-value payments is affected mostly by the percentage element. A business taking a high volume of small payments is affected far more by the fixed amount charged on each transaction, and by any per-terminal costs. A business with a heavy credit-card or business-card mix pays against those rates rather than the debit rate that tends to be quoted.

So the useful figures to pull from a statement are your total card turnover, the number of transactions behind it, the split between card types, and the total charged. Together those tell you what taking card payments actually costs your business as a proportion of what you take — which is a number you can compare fairly against anything else.

If you want to work through this with your own numbers before speaking to anyone, the savings calculator on this site takes the same inputs and shows an illustrative comparison.

Cost is the obvious question, but it is not the only thing a statement and a contract tell you. Settlement timing decides when your takings actually reach your bank account. The terminals you are on decide whether payments fit the way you serve customers — a fixed counter unit is right for some businesses and an obstacle in others. Reporting and integrations decide how long reconciliation takes at the end of the day.

Your contract position matters too: the minimum term, the end date, the notice period, and whether the terminal agreement runs to different dates from the processing agreement. Knowing where you stand is useful even if you have no intention of changing anything.

Different sectors weigh these differently. Garages, MOT centres and tyre fitters tend to mix a few large invoices with smaller counter sales; pubs, restaurants and cafés care more about portability, busy-period reliability and how payments fit around table service.

Take a recent monthly statement and, line by line, put each charge into one of the categories above. Add them together, including the terminal and account lines that are easy to overlook, and compare that total against the card turnover for the same period.

Then check the one-off items. If something appears that you do not recognise, or a non-compliance charge is being applied, that is worth a call to your provider before anything else — it may simply need sorting.

If you would rather not do that yourself, that is the review Ryan offers: send a recent statement and you will get the same breakdown back in plain English, with no obligation attached.