Industries
Restaurants & hospitality
Thin margins, heavy card mix, and a POS that reports yesterday.
What makes this sector different
Hospitality runs the highest card-present volume of any category and some of the thinnest operating margins. A 40-basis-point difference in effective rate is a line cook. Meanwhile the operating questions that decide the quarter — which daypart carries margin, which discount is buying nothing — sit in the settlement file rather than the POS report.
How we approach it
- Cash-discount program sized against your actual card mix, not a blended average
- Next-day funding including American Express so payroll is not waiting on settlement
- Daypart, ticket-mix and repeat-guest analytics from the payment stream
- Multi-unit benchmarking for groups running more than one location
Other industries
Questions
Restaurants & hospitality and card acceptance
What makes restaurants & hospitality different from a generic merchant account?
Hospitality runs the highest card-present volume of any category and some of the thinnest operating margins. A 40-basis-point difference in effective rate is a line cook. Meanwhile the operating questions that decide the quarter — which daypart carries margin, which discount is buying nothing — sit in the settlement file rather than the POS report. A generic rate sheet ignores all of that, which is why two businesses paying the same headline discount rate can have materially different effective rates.
How do you price restaurants & hospitality?
Interchange-plus, so you can see the three components separately: interchange and assessments, which are fixed for every processor in the market, and our margin, which is the only negotiable part. Where a zero-cost program fits, we structure it as cash discount or surcharge depending on your state and your ticket size.
What does the statement review cover?
Your effective rate derived from three statements, the transactions that failed to qualify for the interchange category they should have hit, the monthly fee stack, and any equipment lease hiding behind the processing agreement. It costs nothing and we will tell you if you are already priced well.
Where are you based?
Chicago. The company and all of its software are lovingly created here, and we serve merchants across the United States from here rather than claiming local offices we do not have.
Tell us how your business actually runs.
A scoping conversation costs nothing and ends with a straight answer on whether a custom build is worth it — and what your card acceptance should cost.