Different On Purpose

The day I stopped being able to explain my job

When I started, it was simple. Then the recession came.

Between 2007 and 2009, merchants processed less. Which meant processors earned less. There were two ways to handle that. Ride it out and earn less alongside the businesses we served, or make up the difference by charging them more.

I watched us choose the second one. New fees. Creative math on the fees that already existed.

The one I remember was a monthly charge of about $8.95 per merchant ID. Small enough that nobody in the room blinked.

They were not selling more. They were selling less. That was the entire reason the fee existed.

And nobody had to approve it. Not the merchant. The money came out of the business bank account, one more line among many. Most merchants knew a little more had left. Almost none of them ever found out why. Hard earned profit was being siphoned off quietly, with no explanation attached.

Here is the part I have to say plainly, because it is the part that matters. Everyone on the inside took a cut of the revenue. The more a merchant paid, the bigger our six figure paychecks grew.

Not reluctantly. Not as something we had no choice about. As a win.

I think those who can should help the hurting, not put more weight on them. And if you truly have no choice, if it is genuinely survival, then at the very least do not be happy about it. That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I left.

What we built instead

Leaving was the easy part. Building something that could not drift back into those habits was the hard part.

So weAudit was built mostly by taking things out. Every decision below costs us money. That is not an accident, it is the whole design. An incentive you remove is an incentive that cannot quietly turn on you three years from now.

We do not take a percentage of your savings

The obvious way to charge for this work is a share of what we recover. Plenty of firms do it, and it is easy to defend. We only get paid if you get paid.

I could not do it. Under that model, our best month is your worst year. The more badly you were overbilled, the bigger our check. A client whose statements came back clean would owe that firm nothing, and a firm in that position needs to come back with something. I already worked somewhere my pay went up when your bill went up. I was not going to rebuild that and call it a fee structure.

To be clear about what that means for us in practice: we look as hard as we possibly can on every single audit. Not because our pay depends on what turns up, but because it is the job. A merchant deserves every dollar that is recoverable, and the only reason to look less carefully would be if finding less paid us more. It does not, and it never will.

There is also the simpler version. Take half your savings and you are still overpaying. Just to us instead of them.

At half the savings I would have made more money than I know what to do with, and my grandchildren would never have to work. I have done that math. It is why the fee is fixed instead. You are quoted a number before we start, based on the size and complexity of what you are running. That number does not change if we find nothing, and it does not change if we find a fortune.

Which raises the fair question: what if there is nothing to find? Then you are out nothing. The audit comes first and the audit is free. You see exactly what is on your statements before you are quoted a fee, before you decide anything, and without signing a thing. If we come back and tell you your pricing is clean, that is the end of it and the findings are yours to keep.

Nobody here is ever asked to commit before they know what is there. Not before the audit, and not after it either.

And if the savings we find do not exceed what we would charge you, we waive our fees and take you on at zero cost. That is the real answer to the fixed fee question. You cannot end up paying us more than we saved you, because in that situation you do not pay us at all.

Approved nonprofits are audited and served free of charge, permanently. No fee, no percentage, nothing.

No processor pays us anything, ever

We hold no revenue share, no referral arrangement and no financial tie to any processor or ISO. Partly owned by attorneys, we could not take that money even if we wanted it.

Which means we are paid exactly the same whether you stay where you are, renegotiate, or move. Most of the time the best answer for a client is fixing the relationship they already have, and we have no reason to talk anyone out of it.

No contract

Everything is month to month. Cancel whenever you like.

I hate being locked into a contract. Every time I have signed one I have had the same thought: if this were really going to work, they would not need me tied down. A contract guarantees a firm keeps getting paid whether or not it does what it promised. We would rather earn it again every month.

Our guarantees, in writing

Every firm in this industry says it is the expert and the best. That is marketing, and it costs nothing to print. The two above are what we actually put in writing.

Our fees are published

You can read our pricing on our home page before you speak to anyone. Nobody else in this industry does that, because pricing you privately means pricing you according to what they think you will pay.

Look at how the rest of this industry prices its own work. Let’s talk first, and then we will decide what to charge you. That is the same approach used by the companies they say they are protecting you from. Two identical businesses end up with two very different fees.

Sound familiar? It should. It comes straight out of the processor’s playbook.

Published pricing means you can confirm you are paying exactly what every other business your size pays, before you speak to anyone at all.

We do not bend the process

Every client’s situation is unique and gets treated that way. What does not change is how the audit itself gets done.

We have turned down accounts over this. Nothing improper, just prospects who wanted enough pieces rearranged that it would no longer be the thing we know how to do well. Our fee is as low as it is precisely because we do not deviate. A client who talks us out of our process ends up with a worse result than one who does not, and I would rather lose the work than take the money and improvise.

The year it cost me everything to mean it

By 2013 we were four years in and nearly gone. I had drained most of our retirement and every dollar of savings. We had lost hundreds of thousands. I believed I was about to lose the business and the house with it, and that everyone who had told me not to take on this industry was three weeks from being proven right.

That is when a contact from my banking days called. He had a client in a restricted category, an account the card networks would not approve. He wanted my expertise to get around the rules. He said they would write me a blank check.

I had spent over a decade learning exactly how that rulebook works. That knowledge was the only thing left I owned that was worth real money, and here was someone offering more of it than I had ever had, to point it the wrong way.

I told my wife. She had as much to lose as I did. We decided together that we would rather lose all of it. We value life and people above money, and that settled it.

The questions merchants ask me

If you were part of the problem, why should I trust you now?

Because knowing precisely how the billing works is the job. Nobody learns interchange, downgrades and junk fee construction from the outside. The fair question is not whether I was inside, it is what I am paid to do now. Read the fee structure above. Every incentive I had back then has been deliberately removed from this business.

If your fee is that low, where is the catch?

There is not one, but the honest answer is that we make it up in not deviating and not selling you anything else. We do not receive processor money, we do not resell hardware, and we do not take a cut of what we find. The published fee is the whole relationship.

Why would you help me stay with the processor overbilling me?

Because switching is disruptive and usually unnecessary. Over eighty five percent of processors comply once someone who knows the billing puts the numbers in front of them. We are paid the same either way, so we have no reason to push you into a move you do not need.