Questions I get asked most

You send me a recent processing statement, ideally the most recent full month. I calculate your effective rate, identify every fee on it, and show you the same volume priced against what I can offer.

You get a written summary either way. There is no cost, no obligation, and if your current pricing is already competitive I will tell you that.

Your effective rate is your total monthly fees divided by your total card volume. If you paid $900 in fees on $30,000 of card sales, your effective rate is 3.0 percent.

It matters because it is the only number that captures everything. A quoted rate of 2.6 percent tells you nothing if there are per-item fees, monthly service charges, PCI fees, and batch fees stacked on top of it. The effective rate is what you are actually paying.

No. The analysis is independent of whether you move. Some owners use it purely to understand their statement, and some take it back to their current provider and negotiate.

That is a fine outcome. I would rather be the person who gave you a straight answer than the person who pressured you into a switch.

Often not. A lot of existing hardware can be reprogrammed, and if yours can be, that is usually the simplest path.

If your equipment is genuinely at the end of its life or does not support contactless and chip properly, I will explain the options and the cost rather than bundling it into a lease you did not ask for.

No long-term contract and no early termination fee. The account is month to month.

This is deliberate. If the only thing keeping a client is a cancellation penalty, the pricing was never the reason they stayed.

Approval is usually one to three business days once the application and supporting documents are in. Equipment setup and training is typically scheduled within the following week.

We plan the cutover around your schedule. For a restaurant that generally means a weekday morning rather than a Friday night.

Dual pricing displays a cash price and a card price, so customers choose and you keep the full cash price on cash sales. Surcharging is the related approach of adding a disclosed fee to credit transactions.

Whether it suits you depends on your margins, your average ticket, and your customers. It works well for some businesses and costs goodwill at others. Both are also tightly regulated, including a rule that debit cards cannot be surcharged, so it has to be set up correctly. I will give you a straight recommendation rather than pushing it by default.

Flat-rate providers are genuinely good at being easy to start with. The tradeoffs are that one averaged rate means low-cost transactions subsidize expensive ones, and that they onboard first and underwrite later, which is why accounts sometimes get frozen as a business grows.

With a dedicated merchant account you are underwritten up front, you see interchange separately from markup, and you have a person to call. Below roughly five to eight thousand dollars a month in card volume, flat rate is often the sensible choice and I will say so.

You call or text me directly. Not a ticket queue, not an 1-800 number, and not a sales rep who has since moved on.

For issues that need the processor's back office, I make that call on your behalf and follow it through. Behind me there is also 24/7 support through Green PayTech for anything outside business hours.

Yes, and getting the setup right before you open is easier than fixing it afterward. New businesses are judged on the owner and the business plan rather than a processing record, so how the application is assembled matters.

If you are still in build-out, it is worth talking early. Hardware and POS decisions are much cheaper to make before the counter is installed.

Nothing. I am compensated by Green PayTech on the accounts I place, which means there is no fee to you for the analysis or the setup work.

It also means my incentive is to keep you as a client for years rather than to win a signature once, which is why I would rather tell you to stay put than move you onto pricing you will resent.

I am based in Long Beach and work across Southern California, which is where in-person setup and training are easy to arrange.

Remote setup works fine for businesses further out, particularly online and professional service firms. If you are outside the area, get in touch and we will see whether it makes sense.