Let's be honest — your credit card processing statement might as well be written in another language. Between “interchange fees,” “assessment charges,” and random line items you've never heard of, it's designed to make your eyes glaze over.
That's not an accident. The harder it is to read, the less likely you are to notice you're overpaying.
Let's fix that.
The Three Things That Actually Matter
Forget the 30+ line items for a moment. Your statement boils down to three numbers:
1. Total volume — how much money you processed that month. This is the big number, usually at the top. For a busy DC restaurant, this might be $40,000–$80,000.
2. Total fees — everything your processor charged you. This is usually buried near the bottom, sometimes called “Total Deductions” or “Amount Due.”
3. Your effective rate — divide total fees by total volume, multiply by 100. That's your real rate. If you processed $50,000 and paid $1,600 in fees, your effective rate is 3.2%.
If that number is above 2.5% and you're a card-present business, you're almost certainly paying more than you need to.
The Fees They Don't Want You to Notice
Beyond interchange (which every processor pays to Visa/Mastercard), watch for these sneaky add-ons:
Monthly fees — statement fee, PCI compliance fee, account maintenance fee. These can add $25–$75/month for literally nothing.
Batch fees — charged every time you “batch out” at the end of the day. Usually $0.25–$0.50 per batch. Small, but adds up.
Non-qualified surcharges — the biggest scam in payment processing. If your processor uses “tiered pricing,” they decide which transactions are “qualified” (cheap) and which are “non-qualified” (expensive). Guess which bucket most of your transactions end up in?
What a Fair Statement Looks Like
With interchange-plus pricing, your statement is simple: you see the interchange rate Visa/Mastercard charged, and the markup your processor added on top. No tiers, no qualified/non-qualified games.
That's exactly how we structure things at PAYHERO. Interchange pass-through plus a flat per-transaction fee. You can actually read the statement and know exactly where every penny went.
Don't Want to Read It Yourself?
We get it — you have a business to run. That's why we built the Fair Rate Analyzer. Upload your statement (or just snap a photo of it), and we'll read it for you. You'll see your real rate, what you should be paying, and how much you could save — in about 60 seconds.