Payment calculators

Why these three

Almost every conversation about choosing a payment processor is a conversation about rate. It is the number on the sign, it is easy to compare, and it is the one thing a salesperson will always answer directly. It is also, for most businesses, the least consequential of the three numbers on this page.

A quarter of a point on your effective rate is worth a few hundred dollars a month. That is real money and you should go and get it. But a reserve is a five- or six-figure sum of your own capital held for months, a dispute ratio crossing a network threshold is the thing that puts a reserve on your account in the first place, and neither of them appears in a quote. They turn up later, as a consequence, usually in a notification.

So: one calculator for the number everyone shops on, and two for the numbers that actually decide how your account goes. Read in that order they make an argument. Used on their own, each one is just arithmetic you are entitled to, done properly.

How these are built

• No gate. No email, no sign-up, no "contact us for your result". The result appears as you type.
• Your figures stay in your browser. There is no calculation running on a server, because there does not need to be — the arithmetic would still run with your network disconnected. Like every other page on this site, these pages do load standard web analytics; the numbers you type are not part of that and are not transmitted anywhere.
• The formula is on the page. Each calculator prints the arithmetic it used, with your numbers substituted in, so you can check it on paper. That is the difference between a calculator and a sales tool.
• No comparison against a named competitor. None of these knows our pricing or anybody else's. Reserves, payout holds and network monitoring programs are mechanics of the whole card industry, and we describe them as such rather than attributing them to a company.
• Defaults you can recognise. Every field is pre-filled with a plausible example so the page is useful before you type anything, and every default is yours to overwrite.

A sensible order to use them in

1. Work out what you pay now. Take a recent statement, total every fee on it, divide by the volume you processed that month. That is your real effective rate. Then put a quote you are considering into the effective rate calculator on the same month's volume and ticket, and compare one number against one number.
2. Find out what gets held. Ask any provider you are talking to whether there is a reserve, what would trigger one, whether it rolls or caps, and what the hold period is. Put their answer into the reserve impact calculator. Compare the peak it shows against the annual saving from step one.
3. Check where your disputes sit. Run last month's numbers through the chargeback ratio calculator. If you are anywhere near the published conditions, that is the thing to fix before you shop, because it affects who will underwrite you and on what terms.

If the result of all that is that you are already priced well and nothing needs to change, that is a good outcome and these pages cost you nothing.