Now that you know your effective rate, I’m about to share with you the most significant & final common denominator that each of these plans retain at their core. This is something that payment processors are rarely ever inclined to talk about and that’s this: regardless of the pricing plan, if your practice is still incurring the monthly expense of payment processing fees- you are on a “Bill Forwarding” program. Feel free to read that again. Yes, you are making more money than you think, you just don’t have access to it because of all the fees! These are the true costs of bank interchange & card brand network fees which remain universally the same forwarded costs to you, of any processor you encounter. There’s nothing worse than losing a fraction of your monthly collections to unnecessary bills, which only serve as a permanent loss of capital to your practice. See that old school “not-so-smart” card acceptance terminal sitting on the countertop at the front desk? Yeah, that’s a portable ATM machine. The only problem is most practices are so glad just to be able to successfully collect from the patient that they casually forget, every ATM transaction brings with it, its own respective convenience fees (as mentioned above). Let enough those delayed charges pile up at the end of each month and voila! You now have a monthly payment processing bill. By now it’s likely quite plain for you to see that each time a patient accessed your payment portal whether transacted online or in-person, your patient has had the privilege of walking away at the point in the transaction where the screen shows, their convenience charge. Ultimately, every time your practice eats this digital check cashing fee, you’re annually making a tax-deductible contribution to your practice on behalf of all your patients (while they occasionally get a portion of that money back from the card brands in the form of rewards points or flyer miles. Hey, where else did you think that money came from?)