About Determining Service Charges

The Payment Types record contains many fields that handle service charges. Service Charges should only be configured here for payment types that have the base Type of Credit Card. Service charges are paid by the organization to the credit card company when a customer pays the organization using that card. Organizations have two options:

• Use Aptify to track service charges that they owe to credit card companies (such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express).
• Do not use Aptify to track service charges, and let the credit card companies present monthly service charge bills to the organization.

Recommended configuration of service charges depends on an organization's business processes. It is also good to consider whether the organization has a large volume of payments coming through for a specific credit card.

For organizations that do a large volume of business with credit card vendors, it is advisable to set up payment types to calculate service charges automatically through a service charge liability account. This setup allows multiple payments to be sent to the vendor throughout the month, instead of sending one large payment that has a large effect on the organization's finances. Use the Service Charge fields in the Payment Types record to specify how the service charge is calculated and tracked with GL Accounts in the accounting system.

For organizations that do a small volume of business with credit card vendors, it is advisable to let the vendor send a statement with the amount due. Because the amount is small, paying the vendor once each month makes a trivial difference to the organization's accounts.

Note that a flat fee service charge is expressed in the specified Flat Fee Currency. Payments in Currencies other than the Flat Fee Currency will perform a conversion on the Flat Fee Currency amounts into the Payment's Currency using the most recent spot rate.