Straight answers, including the ones that cost us business

A CRM built to your process rather than one you configure around, with AI given specific jobs inside it: reading and routing inbound email, drafting the follow-up after a quote or call, summarizing calls into the customer record, chasing overdue invoices, and flagging customers who have gone quiet. It is not a chatbot in a sidebar. Each workflow is a defined step with a human approving anything that reaches a customer.

No, not unless you explicitly decide otherwise for a specific workflow. The default is that AI drafts, triages, summarizes and flags, and a person approves anything that leaves the building. Every AI step is logged with what it saw, what it produced and who approved it, so it is auditable and therefore fixable.

No. Your records and transaction data run your workflows and nothing else. We do not pool it across clients, we do not sell it, and we do not feed it into a shared model. You also receive source code and can export your data in full at any time, so nothing about the arrangement depends on trusting us indefinitely.

They are two parts of one engagement. The software is a build with its own cost. The 0% refers to card acceptance: we place your merchant account and structure a compliant cash-discount or surcharge program so the cost of acceptance is not absorbed by your business. The processing cost does not disappear — it moves to the cardholder within the limits the card brands allow, which is permitted in most states, never permitted on debit or prepaid cards, and requires specific disclosure. We install that disclosure as part of the work.

Yes, in most of the United States, and it is permitted under the Visa and Mastercard operating regulations. The requirements are specific: correct disclosure at point of entry and point of sale, a surcharge that does not exceed your actual cost of acceptance, and no surcharge on debit or prepaid cards. We build the program to those rules and install the signage and receipt language as part of the engagement.

There is no long-term processing contract and no cancellation fee. If a separate equipment lease is involved we will identify it, because equipment leases are frequently non-cancellable and are the single most common trap in this industry.

A surcharge adds a fee to card transactions on top of a single posted price. A cash discount posts one price and reduces it for cash. They carry different disclosure obligations and different card-brand ceilings, and the right choice depends on your ticket size, your card mix and your state. A provider that offers only one of the two is fitting your business to their program.

Interchange-plus prices your account as interchange (fixed by the card brands) plus assessments (also fixed) plus a stated processor margin. It is the only structure you can audit, because the negotiable component is printed separately. Tiered pricing, by contrast, sorts your transactions into buckets whose definitions your processor controls. Ask for interchange-plus; the answer tells you a great deal.

No. Surcharging debit and prepaid cards is prohibited outright, which means a compliant program has to identify debit at authorization and treat it differently. Any program that applies one flat surcharge to every card is non-compliant, and that is the single most common defect we find.

Nothing, and no obligation. Submit the form and we will ask for your three most recent merchant statements. We derive your effective rate, identify downgraded transactions and separate interchange from your processor's margin, then show you the arithmetic. If you are already priced well, we will tell you that.

In most cases, no. We work with the major terminal and POS platforms, and the hospitality analytics run off the payment stream rather than a POS integration. Where a terminal genuinely cannot support compliant surcharge logic, we will say so before you switch.

Typically two to four weeks from submitted statements to first settlement — most of which is underwriting and installation scheduling rather than anything you have to do. Standard-risk accounts move faster; high-risk placement depends on how complete the underwriting file is.

No. We place US merchant accounts only, and surcharge and cash-discount program availability varies by state within that.

No hard minimum, but the arithmetic matters: below roughly $10,000 a month in card volume the savings from restructuring are often smaller than the disruption of switching. If that is your situation we will say so rather than sell you a change that does not pay for itself.

Usually, yes. Most declines are documentation failures rather than category exclusions. We rebuild the underwriting file against the specific objection and place it with acquirers who write your category deliberately rather than reluctantly.

A rolling reserve withholds a percentage of your settled volume for a fixed period as protection against chargebacks. In some high-risk categories it is unavoidable. What is negotiable — but only before you sign — is the percentage, the holding period and the release schedule. A ten percent reserve held 180 days is a substantial interest-free loan to your acquirer, and merchants routinely agree to it in the relief of being approved.

The card brands run monitoring programs that trigger in the region of one percent of transactions, with escalating fines and remediation requirements above that. Because the thresholds and program names change, the practical discipline is to monitor the ratio continuously and run representment on disputes worth contesting, rather than to aim just under a number.

Because a single relationship makes your ability to take payments dependent on another company's risk-appetite committee, which can revise its category policy without notice and without appeal. For a high-risk merchant, a second acquirer converts that event from a revenue outage into a bad afternoon.

Next business day, American Express included. Same-day is available on some platforms; we will tell you whether it is worth the fee for your volume, which for most merchants it is not.

Yes, on our platforms American Express settles next business day alongside the other brands. This is worth confirming with any provider, because Amex has historically been funded on a slower cycle and that difference shows up directly in your working capital.

The authorization and settlement stream already carries what you need: timestamps, amounts, tokenized card identifiers and terminal or location identifiers. From those we derive daypart performance, ticket-mix, repeat-guest and lapse rates, and cross-location benchmarking — without touching your POS or adding hardware.

Yes. We build custom CRM systems for small and mid-sized businesses with payments embedded in the workflow rather than bolted alongside it — quoting, invoicing, recurring billing and collection in one system, on the processing rail we already run for you. See the CRM systems page for how those engagements are structured.

You do. Custom CRM engagements are delivered with source code and your data is exportable in full at any time. We do not hold your business hostage to a platform, and we do not sell or share your transaction data.