Where the money was actually hiding
Four worked examples of the patterns we find most often. Figures are illustrative composites, not individual client accounts.
Tiered pricing was reclassifying 38% of transactions
Headline rate 1.79%. Actual effective rate 3.44%. Rewards and business cards were landing in "non-qualified" at 3.65% plus a per-item fee, and nothing on the statement made that visible.
Level III data was never being passed
Corporate and purchasing cards were qualifying at standard commercial rates because line-item data was not transmitted. The rate negotiation everyone focused on was worth a fraction of the fix.
7.4% of recurring charges were failing silently
No account updater, no dunning, no retry logic. Members were not cancelling — their cards were expiring and nobody chased them. The processing rate was almost beside the point.
A 48-month lease on a $400 terminal
$89/month, non-cancellable, 41 months remaining — $3,649 owed on hardware worth about $400. We could not make the lease disappear, and said so. We repriced everything else and set a calendar reminder for the buyout date.
Keyed deposits were triggering card-not-present downgrades
Staff were taking phone deposits by typing the card number into the same card-present terminal used for in-chair checkout, so every keyed deposit qualified at a card-not-present rate instead of a card-present one. Moving deposits to a hosted payment link, with address and CVV verification, put them back in a qualifying program and cut the keyed share of volume sharply.
A PIN pad left in "credit only" mode
A replacement terminal shipped with debit routing disabled by default, so every PIN-debit sale was processing — and pricing — as credit. Nobody noticed because the receipts still said "approved." Re-enabling PIN debit on the terminal and confirming least-cost routing with the processor brought debit transactions back onto the lower-cost network path.
Composite examples built from patterns across statements we analyse. Not individual client accounts and not a prediction of your result. Replace with documented client case studies (with written permission) before launch.
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