preview

Tiered Invoice

Decent Essays

I sincerely believe that less than 1% of the merchants have anyone in their organization that understands the monthly billing statement (invoice). Generally, the sales agent that uses the most unlikely assumptions in making his quote, gets the sale. In my opinion, cost projections made by sales agents are useless and often deceptive and seldom ethical. They love to give cost projections, but often these are not based upon reasonable assumptions. As we discussed above, if the merchant is on a tiered billing scheme, the merchant, and any sales person who gives them a quote, does not know what portion of their sales is at the very low regulated debited card rate and what percent is at the higher purchasing rate. If one sales agent estimates …show more content…

A tiered invoice will have terms like “qualified” and “non-qualified” in it. An interchange plus invoice will list actual interchange brackets in it. Most likely several of the brackets listed in table 1 will appear in the invoice. This obviously is for an account that used tiered pricing because “non-qual” appears in the statement.
The merchant has their processor to clear American Express changes as well as MasterCard, VISA, and Discover. We will discuss American Express later. In order to look at his deal we should remove American Express from the computations.
Notice that the date of the charges is 04/02/13, and the period is 04/01/13 to 04/30/13. This processor posts changes on the first business day of the month for the prior month. The charges do not relate to the items submitted in April; they relate to the items submitted in March. Table 3 below, matches the amount of the credit card sales with the the discount for MasterCard, VISA, and Discover; sales are taken for the March statement; discounts were taken from the April statement, because they appeared at the beginning of …show more content…

On October 1, 2011 the Durbin Amendment reduced the interchange on debit card issued by large banks to a discount rate of .05% (.0005), plus a transaction cost of $0.22; the law called for the transaction cost to be $0.21 but it allowed certain banks to change an additional penny for fraud prevention. A $100 transaction would cost $0.27. Prior to Durbin the interchange fee was about $1.75. The processor wanted accountants to see if their clients were on tiered pricing. In essence the merchants on tiered pricing were being over-charges in two ways: (1.) Tiered pricing allows for large markups and only the processor really knows the markup; (2.) They did not receive the benefit of the Durbin Amendment. This processor wanted to switch merchants to interchange plus pricing, but he want to charge them about a 1% markup. Their fees would go down because of the Durbin Amendment, but they still would be over changed because of excessive

Get Access