The Audit Was Just the Beginning

A regional distributor was projected to save $177,595 over five years. They actually saved $294,110. The difference was not a better audit. It was five years of monthly monitoring.

Regional DistributionOngoing MonitoringRate Hike DefenseFive Year Partnership

$35,519

Estimated year one savings

$294,110

Actual five year savings

66%

More than originally projected

5 Years

Of continuous client partnership

The client

A straightforward question in 2020

Our client is a regional distributor that came to weAudit in 2020 with a simple question: were they paying too much for credit card processing? The answer, as it almost always is, was yes.

What made this engagement exceptional was not what the first audit found. It was what happened over the five years that followed.

The starting point

Five distinct areas of overbilling

The 2020 audit identified five separate problems. Each one was addressable on its own. Combined, they were adding cost to every single transaction the company processed.

None of them appeared on the statement labelled as a problem. That is the ordinary condition of a merchant statement, not the exception.

What the initial audit found

Fee category	Before	After	Issue
Visa, Mastercard and Discover discount rate	8.5 bp	4 bp	Negotiated to less than half the original rate.
American Express rate	25 bp	4 bp	The Amex rate was more than six times Visa and Mastercard. It was aligned to match.
Per transaction fee	$0.085	$0.00	Eliminated entirely.
Interchange rebates on returns	Kept by processor	Returned to merchant	When a customer is refunded, the merchant should get their interchange fee back.
Padded interchange	Charged above set rates	Eliminated	Pass through rate of 2.65 percent, processor was charging 3.00 percent.

Projected versus actual: where the real value lives

At the time of the initial audit, weAudit estimated annual savings of approximately $35,519. That was a conservative, defensible projection based only on the overbilling identified in front of us. Over five years it would compound to an estimated $177,595. What actually happened told a different story.

Estimated five year savings	Actual five year savings
$177,595 Original projection at time of audit	$294,110 66 percent more than projected

A note on methodology

weAudit forecasts conservatively on purpose. Our projections are built to be exceeded, not merely met. No client has ever called to complain that they saved more than we projected. The same cannot be said in reverse. An honest, understated forecast that gets beaten by 66 percent is worth far more to a client relationship than an optimistic one that falls a dollar short.

The difference: ongoing monitoring and active advocacy

The gap between $177,595 and $294,110 did not happen by accident. It is the direct result of monthly monitoring, a service most clients do not fully appreciate until they see the five year number.

Every merchant processing agreement contains a clause letting the processor raise fees at any time, with 30 days for the merchant to dispute. Most merchants never learn a rate hike happened until it has already cost them months of overcharges. Visa and Mastercard publish standard rate adjustments twice a year, in the spring and the fall, and processors routinely pass these through as blanket 10 basis point increases whether or not the underlying network rates actually moved.

What weAudit does every month on your behalf

Proactively opts the client out of the semi annual rate hike cycles before they take effect.
Verifies that the negotiated rates from the original agreement are still in place.
Requests refunds on the client’s behalf when a processor fails to honor the agreement.
Confirms the following month that the corrections were applied and are holding.

One more thing: the fee that never changes

This client signed their weAudit agreement in 2020 at a monthly fee of $300. Five years later that fee has not changed, and it never will for the life of the agreement. Our current rate for a new client at comparable volume is $525 per month.

Their agreement now locks in a rate $225 a month below market, which is another $2,700 a year on top of everything already documented. That is not an accident of policy. weAudit does not raise fees on existing clients. The relationship is built on long term partnership, not annual renegotiation. Our full pricing is published here.

We estimated $177,000 over five years. The actual number came in at $294,110. The audit found the problem. The monitoring made sure it stayed fixed.

Engagement summary, regional distributor, 2020 to 2025

Why this case matters

Most auditing engagements end when the report is delivered. A new processor is found, the rates look better, and the client is left to manage the relationship alone, until the processor quietly reintroduces the same fee structures six months later under a different name.

weAudit is structured differently. The audit is the beginning of the relationship, not the end of it. The $116,515 gap between what was projected and what was actually saved represents five years of monthly vigilance: catching rate hikes before they land, recovering overcharges when processors do not honor their agreements, and making sure the deal negotiated on day one is still the deal in place on day 1,825.

If you want to see the kinds of overcharges that reappear after an audit, our overbilling challenge walks through the most common ones.