I have been working with dentists and reviewing their credit card processing statements for over 25 years. The costs dentists pay on average are far higher than any other industry I’ve seen, and I work across most industries.
The primary reason is due to dental software integration. This higher cost has pushed up the perception of what is a normal cost for a dentist. Once they get you, your rates get raised whenever they want to increase their profits.
All dental software is proprietary. This means that you MUST work through their processing company. Therefore, most dentists using dental software for credit card processing have an effective rate of 3-6%. Your effective rate is the cost of processing divided by the volume of cards taken. For example, if you paid $350 to process $10,000, that is 3.5%. If you only paid 2%, the savings of 1.5% are $150.
With interchange plus pricing, most of my dentists are paying 2% or less. This is a huge difference if you are doing big volumes of transactions. This savings is achieved by taking an extra 3-4 seconds to enter the payment into the software instead of it automatically posting. If you are processing 200 transactions a month and spend an extra 4 seconds to reenter the transaction, that’s 800 seconds (about 13 and a half minutes) of added time monthly. It’s not the big deal the software companies and your staff make it out to be. Most of the savings they show are based on “saved” hours of staff time, not the minutes it takes to reenter the transaction. They focus your attention on this fallacy while raising costs to process cards. You are not deducting money from your staff’s check and the time spent is minimal so where are the savings? What you do not hear is the fact that your staff will spend more time logging into their system and pulling up the patients’ account to complete the transaction than their staff time savings. We put the money back in YOUR pocket!
If you want to add a virtual terminal gateway and send electronic invoices by email or text, do recurring billing and add a payment page to your website, it is available for only an extra $20/month with my program.
Square is 2.75% and dentist mistakenly think that is too high, while unknowingly paying 4% through their current software. In the past, dentists have told me they are paying only 1.25%, because that is what is shown in their statement. After showing them the math, they see their effective rate is 4%. Salesmen lie, math tells the truth. We see flat rate companies trying to fill this void, BUT they’re charging 2.4-2.9% to swipe and even higher to key. Still too high.
Non-disclosed statements are the wave of the future and another way of further confusing merchants and making your costs higher. I see more and more companies using statement formats with NO disclosure, only fees. They say, ‘you took credit cards and we charged you fees, you figure it out!’ LOL!!! This is only to confuse you and to make it harder for me to prove anything. I often show merchants how to calculate their effective rate with non-disclosed statements for them to find out they are paying 4% and I can lower it to 2%.
Therefore, I offer a no obligation trial period. We will loan you a terminal or set you up with our gateway and you can process through us while keeping your other account open, but dormant. You will receive a fully disclosed statement from us, providing proof of what cards your patients are giving you. If after 1-3 months, you do not see the savings, you are free to walk away.
Non-disclosed statements are bad enough but the latest and worst thing being done to merchants is the hidden markup. I’ve seen many statements where the rate is shown to be .10% and $.10 over interchange BUT their effective rate is 3.5%. That is impossible since there is only one card type (Business) with an interchange over 3%. On an interchange plus program, you would have to key ALL your cards without using AVS (2.7%) to come close to that effective rate.
Yet another reason dentists pay a higher cost is your office manager…who does not understand how credit card processing works. I’ve had an office manager tell a doc that my company could not help them – even though I was offering $3,000 a month in savings! Upon learning this, I reached out to the doc and ultimately, the office manager was let go. You must educate yourself and take back control – I guarantee you will save money. And, it’s your money – not your staff’s!!!
If you are interested in learning more, please reach out to me. I can walk you through it high-level in less than 10 minutes! No cost to you or obligation. I’ll do a quick comparison of your current processing against the International Payment Solutions program and determine the potential monthly savings for you.
Next Steps/Options:
- fax a current processing statement to 844-483-1996
- call me directly at 844-483-1995
Finally, if you’ve contacted me in the past and haven’t taken advantage of the savings…WHY NOT?? Reach out now and start putting more money back into your practice – NOT into the bank’s hands.
