QuickBooks is the market dominant accounting software.
When I say it’s dominant, it would be like my in my prime the year I got drafted by the NY Mets playing tee-ball. Dominant – with the distant second place being WAAAYYY in the rear-view.
QuickBooks has been padding its profits for years by levying tiered rate processing fees to its customers.
Understanding Tiered Rates
Tiered is simple – it’s a flat rate for different “types” of payments. Often you’ll see Qualified, Mid-Qualified, and Non-Qualified.
With QuickBooks, they have three tiers, but they name them differently and they’re based on different methods of accepting payment:
99% of payments taken in QuickBooks accounting products are done either via invoice or keyed into the software, leaving the merchant with a minimum processing rate of 2.9% plus 25¢ per transaction.
QuickBooks is making a gigantic spread between the cost of accepting the payment (interchange plus dues & assessments) and what they charge you, the client.
Consider this example:
You send an invoice for $355 from QuickBooks to one of your clients. She pays with her Bank of America regulated debit card.
QuickBooks charges you 2.9% plus 25¢ (355 x 0.029 = 10.30 + 0.25 = $10.55).
The cost of processing that transaction is only 0.05% plus 22¢ interchange plus another 0.13% in assessments – a total of 89¢.
QuickBooks just made themselves $9.66 on this single transaction.
Why do people use QuickBooks for processing if they’re so expensive?
Because it’s easy and often, merchants don’t know they have a choice for QuickBooks payment processing. To save money on QuickBooks payment processing costs, they’d need someone who knows how to connect a different platform to QuickBooks.
QuickBooks Processing is worse than a dedicated gateway connecting to QuickBooks. Not just on cost, but on capabilities (which is crazy, right?).
My team has the best QuickBooks payment processing gateway. Not only do you save a metric crap ton of money on your processing fees, but you gain some pretty impressive features:
- Store multiple payment methods per customer
- Give your field team (sales or techs) their own login to create and collect on invoices in the field
- Email invoices with “Pay Now” links and automatically close the invoice in QuickBooks
- Schedule one-time or recurring payments that sync with QuickBooks
- Run a compliant surcharge program and offset your processing fees while booking the surcharge fees where they need to go in QuickBooks
- Completely eliminate CSV and XLS imports and exports
- Self-signup with branded checkout pages
- Set up free trial offers
- Create payment subscriptions that have an amount down and an automatic subscription amount
- View all of your transactions in real time as soon as they’re authorized
- Automate Level 2 and Level 3 interchange discounts – the BEST rates (save you $100 on every $10,000 of volume!)
