Pacific Coast Society of Orthodontists Bulletin Fall 2021 - 54

Practice Management
Practice Management Diary
Inspect Your Merchant Services
Statements
Dr. Jeffrey A. Nichelini
American Canyon, CA
PCSO Bulletin Section Editor
Merchant fees cost my satellite office 4.2% of
its collections in 2020. Monthly statements
from merchant services are cumbersome, with
hundreds of lines of long numbers and lots of
commas and decimal points, and it never seemed
like a good use of time to inspect them for discrepancies
of small dollar values. However, seeing
this large number staring at me on my annual
profit and loss statement proved this philosophy
to be incorrect. After a thorough inspection of my
monthly statements, many cost-saving discoveries
were made.
The merchant service provider I use is very common
among orthodontic offices, but it will remain
unnamed. The last section of the monthly statement
lists " other fees " charged, and it represents
the biggest sources of wasted money. Specifically,
for each month in 2020, there was a $39 charge
for " Reg Comp, " $45 for " CE Suite, " and $25 for
" Check Fees. " The Reg Comp fee appears if your
office does not complete a regulatory compliance
tutorial online annually. The tutorial is quick and
easy to complete, but somebody at your office
needs to remember to complete it every year. My
office used to be diligent about this, but one year,
the reminder email was overlooked, and consequently
we have paid $39 every month ever since.
The CE Suite fee was introduced in August 2019
for a feature that required an opt-out to avoid being
charged. The feature is completely irrelevant
to my office and very likely to most orthodontists.
Please do yourself a favor and look at the last
page of your merchant service statement to make
sure you are not wasting $45 every month. The
Check Fee is for the privilege of allowing patients
to make payments on our credit card terminal
using their checking account information, much
like a digital check. To clarify, this is not a fee for
a transaction, just the privilege of being able to
complete charges in this manner. Apparently,
in the past five years I have had a total of six
patients pay with this feature, but I have paid $25
every month for five years to provide the option.
Eliminating these three fees will save me $1,308
this year!
There is also a " Discount Fee, " which is the
amount of money kept by the merchant for
each of your transactions. The total discounted
amount is calculated by adding a fixed amount
for each transaction and a percentage of the total
transaction values. The fixed amount that each
transaction costs changes depending on how
the transaction is completed. In my office, we
discovered that a setting in our software omitted
the requirement that patients enter their zip
codes into the terminal when completing payments.
Payments were still approved but with a
higher fee than if the zip codes had been entered.
The Discount Fees, both fixed amounts and
percentages, attached to your account can also
change with time. It was an unpleasant surprise
to discover the fees charged to my account were
much higher in 2020 than when the account was
opened. A call to the service provider initiated a
renegotiation that brought them down significantly.
Merchant
service fees are small for each transaction
but accumulate and result in big dollar
expenses. If you have not audited your statements
recently, you might have many thousands
of dollars waiting to be easily saved.
54
PCSO Bulletin
Fall 2021
Pacific Coast Society of Orthodontists Bulletin Fall 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pacific Coast Society of Orthodontists Bulletin Fall 2021
