FinTech Friday | How much do you really pay for merchant services? | FinTech | Payment Processing | Small Business | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast

It's showtime, baby! It's showtime! What time is it, Jay?

It's time for the B2B Ball Podcast. What's up, everybody? It's FinTech Friday. Yay!

I caught Justin off guard.

Yeah, you messed me all up.

Uh, it's not fun, it's Friday.

Yeah, where else is fun? FinTech Friday. Uh, we'll be providing you educational information about fintech, small business payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And again, it's FinTech Friday. Yay! Headed into the weekend strong. Uh, I've been sneezing all day. I don't know if this— just the allergies are in it, so if I sound a little—

it's been a little windy outside, so probably like the dust is—

yeah, even Rocky's coughing up a hairball. Uh, yeah, so I mean, I got a little scratchy. I, I don't feel sick at all. It just— it must be allergies. That's— it's got to be out. Oh yeah, so today is FinTech Friday once again, and so we're going to be talking about, uh, how to read your merchant statement. Um, Allen wanted to, uh— he had an interesting phone call earlier in the week and, uh, a few of them, a few of them. And he had to explain to people how much they were actually paying, and they were trying to argue with him, saying like, no, no, no, this is what I pay. And, and he proved them wrong quickly.

And, oh no, I educated them.

Well, he educated them and also proved them wrong. You know, I, I'm a stickler in that way.

I mean, I don't know, I don't want to throw, you know, I just try to, I try to break it down, you know, so it's easy to understand because you get you know, you get a merchant statement and then it can be, you know, I mean, I'm showing one to Justin now. 1, 2, 3, 4 pages, 5 pages long with a lot of data.

Yeah. You know, and it looks overwhelming, I'm sure, right?

And it's overwhelming to the client. And they're like, well, you know, I pay too much money. And then I'm like, well, how much do you think you pay? And then they're like, well, I'm not sure, but it's too much.

Yeah, right.

So the simple formula to figure out what you pay is— there's a simple formula. You take all the fees that you paid, okay? We don't have a calculator out, but we could get one out. You take all the fees you paid— I got it, I got a calculator— okay? And then you divide that by sales, okay? And that basically—

so what's our fees?

Okay, so for this client, we'll do this one first. The total fees that they pay— let me find it. So they say, because what confuses people is a lot of times there's daily fees, right? So you have to take the daily fees. So this guy, the daily fees of $524.19. And then by the time, you know, when then a day— no, that's for the month. Oh, and then you have to add in $68.35.

$68.35, right?

That's his total fees, almost $600, right? And then he did in sales, his total sales were $22,265. So you take the— you take the $600 divided by $22,265, and then he got a rate of 2.0—

0.026.

So that's 2.66%. Is that good?

Yeah.

So that's a good rate. 2. Yeah, 2. I mean, I did 2.26%. That's everything. That's all in. But if you want to drill down— that you want to drill down more, right, and say, okay, well, a lot of things are not included in there. So let's just say we take out the monthly fee, $10, and this PCI compliance, $10, and then he has a software fee of $20. So that's $40, right? So we take— we'll take $40 off, right? What was it, $590? So it's $550. So now do $550 divided by the sales, $22,265.

$550 divided by— geez, what's going on here?

550 divided by 22, 250, um, 265, 2.47. So really his rate's 2.47 plus the, the equipment fees and stuff. Well, it should have been less actually. 2 point— oh no, it is, it's 00 point— oh, 2 point— no, 2.47 4 was 2.2. Yeah, so he paid 2.47. There's two ways to look at it. All in, it's 2.26. So it's not bad. It's, it's a pretty good— it's, it's a fair— that's fair. I mean, can you save money? Yeah. Oh, shave off here, shave off there. But you know, when it comes down to it, what you're going to do is you're not going to save much money. Maybe you can shave off a little bit here and a little bit there., right? But only $22,000 worth of volume. Now other people might, you know, then if you— let's say you wanted to be on cash discount and you were collecting the fee, right? And you— let's say you were collecting a 3% fee, you're charging a 3% fee, your net would be zero.

Nice.

So, you know, that's what people have to look at when they want to say— when they want to save money, you know. So statements can be complicated, but you have to understand the form. But somebody showed me a statement they didn't send it to me, they did a screen share and they said, oh, I pay 2.9%, right? So I say scroll down, right? So I look and I see the daily fees coming out, 2.9%, and they had done, um, about $300,000 that month. That month. So they did 2.9% and they did $300,000. So, and then I look down on their bill some more and I go, oh, I see something on there. And I was like, how much is the 2 times 2.9%?

$870,000.

No, let me—

oh, you say times?

Yeah, times 0.2. Yeah, 2.9%.

What is the, uh, no, no, just clear that out.

Do $300,000 and then do 2.9 and hit percent.

Yeah, right, right.

And hit equals. They spent $8,700. Then I go down to the bottom and I see another $9,500. So they go, oh no, the total is the $900— $9,500. I go, no. I said, go look at your deposits. And if you have daily discount, that's already been collected. Then when I started reading, I said, oh, it says over here that a couple of lines— one said non-qualified, the other one said misuse of auth. So I started asking them how they were processing the transactions. So they were telling me that somebody comes to the website and let's say the item is that they're signing up to be I get a table at an event, right? So the tables are $400 or $800, right, each table. So they were pre-authorizing the card for the $400 or the $800, and then they were holding that until the person got approved, and then they processed the transaction 2 to 3 weeks later, sometimes a month later, and they were using the authorization code that they already got weeks ago. So all those transactions were non-qualified. That's— and then they got— so they paid double. Why are they doing that? They— because they wanted to have some automated workflow going on so they didn't have to go back in and reprocess the cards. And I said to the guy, that's a huge mistake because you just spent double on credit card processing.

Right.

Plus, you could get a warning from the credit card processor and somebody could do a chargeback because basically it's unauthorized, because authorization drops off after a few days.

Right, right, right, right.

On a debit card, it drops off after 24 to 48 hours. On a regular credit card, 2 or 3 days, it's gone unless you're a special merchant like a hotel or a car rental. Something like that where the authorization holds, you know, over time. And I've even seen now where hotels start to, uh, they start to charge your card daily. When I was in Vegas, they charged my card every night for the hotel room.

Really?

Yeah, every day they charged my—

smart though, I guess—

card for some reason. Yeah, they charged the card, and then at the end I got a refund. For like the deposit, whatever, because it went over the deposit. I don't know, it was very weird how they did it, but I guess they're protecting themselves from people over not having the money on the card.

Yeah, it makes sense. So I was explaining to them that, hey sir, you gotta check out, your card was denied, right?

Pretty much. They would probably lock you out of the room, of course. And, um, so I was explaining to them, I was like, you know, we got to sit down You know, we're signing an NDA now. We got to sit down and we got to work on a better workflow so you're not double paying for credit cards. And their credit card company, I hate to say it, shame on them that they not taking care of that for them. But they, they should be taking care of that. They should be taking care of that and not doing that. But you have to— a lot of times the business owners don't— they don't understand what they're actually paying for credit cards. So like, here's another one. Let's do this, the math on this guy. So this customer paid— let's see how much they paid for credit card processing. So they paid $53.25 $5,325, and their sales were $408,929.

Uh, times—

you said divided by $408,229. Zero. So they paid 1.3% for Cardi B. That's nice. Yeah. You could do it. They got the right type of pricing and do a ton of debit, and then they have a lot of costs that they're, they're collecting part of the fee. But in actuality, they're collecting a 1% fee. So let's take— let's get the net effect here. So let's take the $408,929 minus $165,075. Gives us a net $243,854. So times that times 1%, $2,438.

$2,438, call it $2,439.

$439. So now let's take the 5. So, so in actuality, if you take their— their— in actuality, they basically paid nothing for credit card processing.

Nice.

Because they collected 1%, they collected $2,000-something on the $5,000. They collected nearly half the fees, right? So they're covering part of their credit card processing.

They, they've currently negotiated—

well, no, we helped, we helped analyze. They wanted to charge people 1% when they pay online.

Oh.

So if you pay online, then we can't tell from the statement who paid online, who paid in person. But if you pay online, they charge 1% like service charge. So when you think about that, then you take half the fees. So let's take $2,500. Yeah, divided by the $408,000. What's that? $409,000.

$2,500 divided by $409,000. Right, equals, uh, 0.0011, right?

They paid next— they didn't even pay a percent, right? They paid less than half a percent for credit card.

That's nice, right?

So you have to figure out like, what are you doing in your business and how is that all working out, you know?

And you can call Allen and set up a consultation appointment. You can walk through, or you could text the word book to 954-827-9818, and he'll be happy to get back to you and tell you how much you're really paying for your credit card fees, right?

So it's a simple— it's a simple formula.

Credit card processing fees.

How much did you pay? And then divide by the, you know, and then divide by the sales, you know. So here, like, here's another one. Let's do this one too. So this is an interesting one. This is a guy that wants to switch to cashless cap. So he paid $3,878, and then divide by the sales, $172,781, 2.24%. So they could easily, you know, we could easily go in there and tell them, okay, well, you're going to do 2.5% on cash discount, right? And then basically you would be paying zero. It might go a little higher because it's a restaurant and the tips are not usually calculated into the, into the fee structure. So if, you know, someone paid, had a bill for $100, we talked about cash discount before, and let's say they were doing 3%, then the total would be $103. But if you left a tip on there you know, let's say $20, then it would be $123, but you only collected that, like, the 3%. But if we charge on, let's say, 2.5—

oops—

2.5 or 2.6% or something like that, it would come out to where they're basically, like, covering all their fees including the tips. So you gotta, like, take that all that into account when calculating like cash discount for merchants, but they have a deep, you know, they have a decent, you know, they have a deep rate. Now people don't understand. They go, oh, I'm paying too much because they see this big number. Oh, I spent almost $4,000. Okay, well, you spent $4,000. Okay, no, no, I'm just saying you spent $4,000, right? You spent $4,000, you know. But, you know, how can you spend less? They already have like a pretty, a pretty thin, you know, they already have a pretty thin, a pretty thin rate. So you're not gonna, you're not gonna be able to really save all that much, you know. You're not going to be able to save a ton of money. I mean, dude, that's why merchants now, like, we're going into this recessionary period, right, where we get spooky, right? Right. We've been in a recession. Anybody who says like, oh, the recession is coming— no, we've already had— we're in a recession.

Yeah.

So we can't say like, oh, we're, we're, we're in a, we're in a recession. You're in a recession. So you have to, you know, you have to watch what you're doing. And in some businesses it works where, where you're, you know, where you're, um, you could do— you could charge a small fee. That's why I was telling you, like, the one place that people that pay, they do 1%. Yeah. It's not, that's not That's not a lot, right? It's not a lot for to charge, but it's helping them maintain their, their—

I mean, I see that all the time.

What, pay 1%? Yeah, 1%, 2%, it's pretty common. But people don't understand like the, like how it, like how it works. It's that simple. You just take your fees, divide by your sales, boom. And then you have to look at all the fees on, on your statement. And I've heard many merchants are like, well, you know, all this merchant processing, it's— I don't like it. I would rather have, you know, be on a flat rate. Or, you know, why can't you guys do something like PayPal, Square, and Stripe? Why do I have to deal with all this like PCI compliance stuff, right? And all of that, right? So they don't want, you know, they, they don't want to— they don't understand like those You know, how do those business models work? But, you know, transparency has been a big discussion when it comes to the financial industry. And probably in the last quarter here of the year, we've seen all kinds of things going on about truth in lending laws being violated. Fin— certain companies, a bunch of fintech companies, a bunch of fintech companies getting in hot water about loans. PPP loans, the, the Employee Retention Credit loans, the EIDL loans, the, you know, all related to the SBA. I mean, here the SBA announced— what was that, a couple months ago— that they wanted to expand working with fintechs, and now they're completely rethinking that because all the fintechs were—

now they're banning them.

Right.

But they're banning them from the, from the Small Business Administration.

Now, they were able to get the money out there, but they got tons of it out there fraudulently. And even Kabbage, which was purchased by American Express, is in trouble with that.

They got banned.

Yeah, they all getting banned from working with the SBA. There was a whole list that came out today.

They named a long list.

Yeah. And they named a couple of banks in the list that are under investigation, that were under investigation.

They're not banned yet, but they are under investigation. Right. Other people that he mentioned are out of here.

Oh yeah, there was like 3 or 4 companies, maybe longer list. It was a whole list. They're just— they're out, they're out. It was like 10, it was like 10 companies. Oh yeah, no, but there's— throughout the week there was like articles, this company, that—

oh yeah, yeah, right, right, right.

And now the whole list came out today and there was, I don't know, 10 companies. There was 2 or 3 banks on there.

Yeah, something like that.

And they're They're, they're not really— they're not banks that have like a physical presence. They're neo-style banks, you know, the online banks. And, you know, so there's been a big discussion about, you know, financial, financial transparency. And, you know, we try to educate people on the podcast about, you know, financial literacy when it comes to business. We talk about financial literacy and your personal life, right? We've talked about that before. But, you know, we talk about this— is this understanding your merchant statement is financial literacy when it comes to your business.

Absolutely.

You know, and people need to understand the same thing. Like, I'll talk to people and they say, oh, I use QuickBooks. Okay, well, how much do you spend? Oh, QuickBooks, it's very cheap. But then I tell them this exercise: take how much you spent for credit card processing, divide by the sales, and then you'll know what the rate is. And sometimes they'll tell me, oh, I'm paying 5%, 6%. Um, I had a merchant that was on Stripe. I showed— they showed me also a screen share, and I was like, no, that's not what you paid. I go, here's more fees over here, more fees over here, and there was even a 5% holdback that they knew nothing about.

Yeah.

Then they decided to go to this other company who told them that there was a flat rate. They went to them and they processed over there. They showed me the statement again, and I go, you still don't understand what I'm trying to explain to you. I go, take the— what you spent, look what you spent there, add the daily fees plus the rest of the fees, then divide it out. And they were still paying too much money. I was trying to explain to them that They're not playing paying a flat rate.

So you didn't tell me that this guy, you were already telling me he's paying too much fees, he didn't use our Nationwide Payment Systems, went to another company, then decided to call you and was like, I like, see what I told you, or what?

No, he was trying to show me that he got this great deal, and then when I showed him the— when I showed him— I guess I'm trying—

I'm missing something here. How did he not choose us?

Oh, because he thought that I was telling him the price was too high, but he doesn't understand. Like, people will— I always say, this is one of my favorite sayings: figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure. Yeah, that's like once a merchant showed me a spreadsheet and I looked at the spreadsheet and I go, that spreadsheet is not added up correctly. And the guy goes, how do you know that without adding it up? I said, I know how to read spreadsheets. Okay. You can look at a spreadsheet and tell whether it's been put together correctly. Yeah. Okay. So I took the spreadsheet because it was on a PDF. Okay. Right. So I took it, copied and pasted it into— I learned these tricks, like you can copy and paste the PDF onto the Excel, and there's even like now a conversion thing. You can convert it, right? So I converted it over and then I redid all the numbers because there was no formula, so I had to do it by hand. And I did it while the guy watched on the screen. I said, you can get out your calculator. And I says, you're going to spend more money with that company because they're just— the guy just made the numbers up. It's all— it was all made up because I copied and pasted. I left it above and then I put it below, and I was like, that's made-up numbers. The guy just made— he just deducted off $300 and out of nowhere, out of nowhere, he just made it up. Because, you know, you have to compare apples to oranges. And then some people will tell you, to me, I prefer the Square Stripe PayPal model, although I will say that PayPal has gotten away.

I have a question, is why do they prefer that though?

They prefer it because they feel that it's more transparent.

What's in transparent to whom?

To, to their clients? No, to them. No, the business feels like it's more transparent. Oh, Square charges 2.65%, right, and 10 cents, and that's it. That's all I pay. There's no monthly fees, there's no this fee, there's no regulatory fee, no PCI compliance fee, no non-compliance fee, right? So no, but for some people, it— for some people it works because they feel like— because it's a bundled rate, like all the services are bundled in, right? So they just feel like, I know that's what I'm paying, they take it out every day out of my deposit, and I'm good with that. And they don't get a statement, no fuss, no muss, it's easy. Now, is it—

now, could be lazy, huh?

Nothing. No, no, no, that's not lazy. It does. That works for some businesses. For some businesses it works. It's a simplified pricing plan. You're just using a dashboard to— a dashboard for everything. You're not getting any monthly statements in the mail and all that. Listen, 100 million customers use the— all of those companies, all the PayPax, right? So there's, there's something to be said for that.

I mean, I used PayPal for 10 years.

Right, but I'm saying there's something to be said for those— for that solid. Now you're using the nationwide payment systems, and we have the same thing, simplified pricing. The reason we introduced that is because a lot of people requested that type of pricing. Yes, we don't want to pay PCI, we don't want to deal with PCI, we don't want to do this. I had a discussion on LinkedIn the other day, they were talking about PCI compliance, and I said, listen, you know how many times client says to me, like, They're not filling that PCI out. They don't care about it. They're not going to fill it out. They don't understand it. They're not going to— they don't want to take the time to do it. And then I tell them, like, you're paying this noncompliance fee. And then, you know, you take the risk of one day they go talk to somebody who's using Square or Stripe and they go, well, we don't have any of those fees. Then they just switch over to that.. And even though they might be paying a little bit more, or, and they might be dealing with not getting, you know, a physical statement in the mail, things like that, they're happy with that because they feel like it's a more simplified pricing. Now, I agree with it. I agree with, you know, there's, there, those companies won't also approve everybody. They don't do certain types of businesses. So it's not for everybody, of course, right? But it does serve a purpose for sure. And, you know, a lot of small businesses, you know, we developed a suite of services and people get this dashboard. It does way more, and a smart terminal, and it does way more than just a regular credit card processing account. And I think that over time, you know, I'm probably a little ahead of the curve, but right? But I think over time this is what people want. When I talk to people and they're using Square, they tell you all— they tell you all the great stuff about Square. They don't care how much they pay Square. They're just happy to have that dashboard with all those.

Yeah, you're not lying, because everybody I talked to about it like lately, they're like, oh, Square, this, it's so great, blah blah blah.

Well, no, they don't— they don't really care about the price.

They don't care.

The services is what—

that's what I'm saying. Yes, they're they're bigging Square up like they're the best ever, you know. And I'm like, right.

So we sit— we have a similar type product now that gives you all of those kind of features like, like Square does. And it's going to get better and better and better. And the difference is we actually have customer service.

But it's, you know, you know, before you get into that, we want to say thank you to all the followers. Shout out to Nationwide Payment Systems for sponsoring the podcast. Without you, you know, we wouldn't be able to get this done. Please follow the podcast on all of the DSPs, all of the popular ones that you're, you know, streaming your latest Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, whatever it is that you're listening to. Leonard Skinner, Leonard Skinner, the Doors, AC/DC, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, whatnot. But we're on all the streaming platforms like— I like those guys— Spotify, iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Pandora Radio, YouTube, Amazon Music. And yo, do not forget to like and subscribe the B2B Vault YouTube channel. Please don't forget to turn on post notifications for future dings on your phone when we go live. Follow the podcast on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok @B2BVault. So yeah, man, what else you got? I'm about to sneeze again.

So let's talk about the alternative payment quagmire, right? So that's a big word, a 10— it's a funny word, $10 word, right? So alternative payments started coming in, you know, they've always been around, like Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, other pay other what they call P2P, person-to-person payment platforms. And when the pandemic started, tons and tons of businesses all of a sudden like, nobody wants to touch anything, right? So they don't want to touch the cash, right? Oh, no cash. I remember my son works in a retail store, they're like, no cash. My son started complaining to the upper management. They're like, listen, people are walking out of the store because they have cash. We got to start taking cash, right?

And they start taking cash.

Now they finally started taking cash again. You know, they were telling my son, oh yeah, spray the cash with Lysol, right? At the end of, you know, my son was laughing. He's like, whatever. So it was just cracking me up. But they had to because it's a store that attracts young people, right? And it's in the mall. Somebody gets off work, they're a waitress, they have cash, right? And now they want to go buy a shirt.

Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, like, I'm not giving my daughter Mariah and Carolina— I'm not giving them my debit card to go to, you know, like, hey Dad, I want a new pair of shoes. Or, well, not shoes, that's a bad example because I buy it online. But whatever, they need a new backpack, they want to go pick one out. I'm not gonna give them my debit card. Yeah, they can go all wild, get a $200, uh, and I come up back, they go to, they go to Off-White and that's $1,400 for, uh, for a backpack that's this big.

Uh-oh. That's not— or they go to the Gucci store.

Yeah, exactly. Come out with a pair of flip-flops, right? Gucci slides.

So a lot of people started using those companies and now I'm telling everybody, we did a podcast about this earlier in the year.

Funny, we talked about this. I was— I was— my dad actually brought this up to me. Yeah, he said you guys have been talking about like— because we've— we heard about this before.

We heard about it.

Yeah, in 2021 we started to hear the little echoes in the hall.

Well, no, we saw they signed the bill.

No, I'm saying before that. Yeah, before they signed the bill, even before that, we were talking about how, you know, these Cash Apps— because as a business owner, I've always been on like the, the cusp of technology, right? Like I've always been trying to find the most cutting-edge tool to use, right? And so like when PayPal came out, that was a great tool, right? Yeah. And then Cash App came out which was a great tool, right? I mean, it was immediate, you know. You, you know, you finish a job, the guy was like, how much do I owe you, Justin? Well, you know, blah blah blah, $1,500, done. You know what I mean? Like, immediately, right? It works great. You get your Cash App card, blah blah blah. But the thing is, like I was trying to say, was that we've been seeing this. We've literally foretold it.

Yeah, we foretold it.

We literally told you guys to stop using these services so that you could stop screwing yourselves, right?

Well, not only that, now you're gonna get hit. People— some people got hit last year.

Yeah.

And then this year, everybody—

well, I got my letter last year for sure.

Oh, you got— but I'm saying now this year, people are re— that, you know, because they didn't catch everybody.

Well, they caught my ass. They didn't catch everybody, but now they caught a I mean, it was stupid because there's nothing to— I have my business EIN, you know, everything was legit. So it's not like I was hiding anything. No, no, but they finally are like, yo, we got to send you a 1099.

Yeah, but not just that, they also started changing people like, oh, this is not a personal account anymore. Oh, now you're on the business account and here's the business pricing. Yeah. And I've seen the prices.

That's not fun.

Like, I've seen the pricing. Like, PayPal used to have very transparent, simple pricing. Now you go on the PayPal site, go to the pricing page. It's a complicated matrix.

I tell you, they take a nice chunk.

It looks— no, no, PayPal looks worse than a merchant statement.

I believe you, because when you get your, you know, like on a, on a deposit— hey, Mama, I love you, good afternoon— um, like when you get a deposit, you know, say you're building a $10,000 website, right? You know, you do that in thirds or whatever, how you do your right payment. So say you do it in, in, in half an hour and half when you're done, right? Well, you get $5,000, right? PayPal's taking a nice piece of that. I know, but what I was saying is, is that beyond all the other fees—

I know, but I'm saying now that I was talking to somebody and they were telling me this, they got to get off PayPal. We just signed them up and I says, why? And the guy's like, he's like, dude, they changed all the fees around. There's a transfer fee now and this No, no, I'm just saying, like, because before the guy was using, you know, the friends and family type deal, you know, they were skirting around the edges. So, but now they put the kibosh on that. You transfer a certain amount of money, they go, no, you're a business, you have to have the business pricing. And then they have all this— these tiers.

Yeah, and all this stuff.

He's like, it's beyond— he says it's worse than a merchant account. I started laughing. So he's like, I need to get a merchant account. Uh-oh, customer Mosquito.

No longer a mosquito, he's alive.

So, so now more people are going to get these 1099s. I was listening to a guy on, uh, YouTube and he was saying that he was a creator, right? You know, one of the content creator type of guys. Yeah, like, uh, you know, an influencer. So the guy was like, Oh my God, he's like, he goes, he goes, I don't know what to do. He's like, I need to get an accountant. He's like, I got a bill from Zelle, I got a bill from Cash App, I got a bill from Venmo, I got a bill from PayPal, I got a bill from, uh, it's like some, some company that was just like said, like, transferring, like doing ACHs into his account. He's like, they sent him— they never sent him a 1099 before. They sent him a 1099. He's like, oh, I didn't know how to pay all taxes. Oh, I was like, I didn't know I had to pay all these taxes. Yeah, yeah, the guy was an influencer and he's selling, like, he was getting money from these, uh, affiliate companies, right? And he's like, oh, all these affiliate companies started, you know, they got busted, right?

So now they got a 1099.

So they got it, they got busted, they got whacked. So there's 1099 to everybody. So now he's getting all these 1099s from this company, that company, He's like, yeah, because I got to go to H&R Block. He goes, I have no idea what's going on.

He's going to get— he's going to be paying a lot.

Yeah, it's going to get a huge— get— getting— he said he got hit. He's getting hit with a huge tax bill for sure. People don't understand, you got to pay taxes. There's just no way around it. No, there— now you could— there's no way around paying the tax.

Yeah, my dad always told me there's two things in life that are guaranteed.

Yeah, death and taxes.

Death and taxes. No, so actually my grandpa said that.

So, so another guy was telling me a similar story, so I was like, listen, it was just—

I'm sorry, man, but it's just my grandfather's birthday on the 7th. Happy birthday.

Happy birthday, Grandpa.

Rest in peace. I love you very much. I miss you. Give Grandma a kiss and a hug for me, please.

All right. No, so I was telling— another guy was telling me a similar story. They got— he's getting whacked with all these feels right. He got— he filed his taxes in 2021 and he didn't pay attention that maybe he got some 1099s in the mail. He ignored them. And then the IRS kicked back his 2021 taxes and goes, no, you didn't report all this income from all these different companies. Oh yeah. And they sent him a bill for like the last 2 years.

And they can make the bill whatever they want. Pretty much.

Yeah.

Oh yeah, they literally— they just— they just said, you know, Bill, it was like $4,700, right? And I was reading into it and they were like, well, we don't— I didn't read, I called. She was like, well, we don't know how much you made or how much you didn't make, so we came up with a number.

Yeah, an estimate.

An estimate.

That's what he got because he didn't pay, right? They gave an estimate and you didn't file.

So I'm like, yo, What happens if I file the taxes?

Well, you wouldn't have got hit.

No. But so she's like, well, if you file, then I would have to refile. It's just a mess. So ladies and gentlemen, business owners all across the United States of America, pay your taxes.

Yeah, but do it the right way. Get a federal tax ID number. Yes. Either get a corporation or a single-member LLC, or at least free to get your tax identification number, right?

Free.

You know, but you could also just file like a DBA, you know, and then open a separate bank account. A DBA is anywhere from $35 to $100, $150, depending on the state.

On your state, yeah.

You could just buy it on the state, depending on which license you need.

I mean, there's so many variables, but you're looking at, let's just say, $200, right?

Well, you need a business license in some cases to sign up for your—

to, to have all the basic coverage. You grab all your bases covered to be legitimate, $200, you should be good to go, right?

Yeah, it could be a little more, but you know, depend— let me tell you, some places like Miami, it's gotta have a gazillion licenses.

Yeah, no thanks. It's ridiculous. Fort Lauderdale is kind of the same.

I have the Broward County license, a sales tax license, which they don't charge a yearly fee for it, and, and then you have to have the Fort Lauderdale license. So between Fort Lauderdale and Broward County, that's around $200. A little over $200. And then the funny part was Fort Lauderdale forgot to send me the bill for like the previous year, so they sent me a bill for 2 years plus a fine. I called them up on the phone, I go, uh, you never sent me a bill. Yeah, we know. So I said, well, can you take the fine off? They were like, if you pay it today online, we'll take it off. So the lady walked me— she goes, let me take it off. And then I paid online and they removed the thing.

Yeah, that, that's— I have a kind of a weird— it's kind of the same city.

Yeah, man, I always have a thing.

Sunbiz is kind of like that too.

Yeah, but you know what I said?

You gotta be careful.

Don't— if you don't ask, you won't get a discount.

Oh, for sure.

They made a boo-boo. The lady admitted to me, she goes, oh, you called up, you're smart, we'll take it off the bill. People that don't call up and mail a check in, they got, you know, they're paying the fine. Yeah, right. And I was like, well, how would I know that I was getting a bill? She goes, you wouldn't. It was pretty funny. But, you know, if you have your money going into it, right? If you have your money going, don't commingle your funds.

No.

So if you have your— if you have a business, open up a business. Even if you just—

there's a really good example of that. What? That's in the news right now.

Yeah. What's the good example?

Who's the guy?

FTX. Yeah, that's a comming— that guy's commingled everything. This is the— this guy commingled 147 companies' money all over the place, commingled all. That's it. Now, you feel bad?

Have you read anything about that, that young woman?

I didn't like it. Oh, I didn't like his interview. I didn't like his interview. He basically goes, yeah, maybe I should have paid attention, maybe I should have learned a little bit more about risk management.

I mean, this is what—

maybe I should have kept an eye on things for an hour a day.

Dom DeLeon, send questions to press@b2bvault.info. Press.

Or you can type a question in right here.

Or you could type a question in.

Type a question in right now and we'll answer it.

Yeah. But, uh, yeah, man, there's been so much going on, especially—

yeah, the FTX thing, that's just completely out of control. And now there's— now there's, uh, we saw there's a lawsuit against the influencers who were telling people to, to invest in FTX and buy on FTX. Now the influence are getting sued.

Not just FTX, the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

And then who is on that? Justin Bieber. Everyone. Oh yeah, the whole list of celebrities.

Yeah, there was a huge list of celebrities. Stephen Curry is on both. List.

Stephen Curry. Oh my God, he's on both.

He's on the FTX list and the— wow.

There was a guy that was at— on the Heat, and he was a, uh, he was, he was sponsored by Voyager, which got bought by FTX. One of the, one of the Heat players really was an influencer for that, for Voyager.

No, that's from—

no, no, no, no, it's the guy He had a unique name with a Duplo. Duplo. He was injured. He did really well for the Heat last year in the playoffs, came back late in the season.

Not a big NBA guy, but the, the, uh, Go Bucks though.

Go Bucks. Yeah, last night I went to the, uh, NHL, the Panthers game. They won 5-1 over the the Detroit Red Wings. That was a fun game.

I liked that. I went with my wife for the first time, a couple— about a month ago, and first time I've ever been to a hockey game. Well, an NHL hockey game, and that's high intensity.

But there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the news. And so today we taught you about your merchant statement. Take your fees, divide by sales, get your effective rate. Doesn't matter what platform you're on. Whether you're on Stripe, Square. It's the most important thing you have to understand. And the other thing that people don't understand about— I get a big thing. I was reading online in a forum, a business forum that I was in, and they were like, oh, it's impossible to lose a chargeback. It's impossible to win, right, chargeback. And I totally disagree with that. One of the things about— and we'll— I almost want to do— we just did a show about chargebacks, right? Recently, you know, and, and, and I wanted to address the charge, you know, the chargebacks. You know, people need to keep an eye on that. You need to keep an eye also on your bank account, okay, your business bank account. I can't tell you how many times, like, I have clients that will call up on the phone, they'll be like, oh, I changed my bank like last week, and I'm like, yeah, They're like, well, I'm not getting any deposits. Like, you didn't call us. You got to fill out a bank change form, send it in, because we're still sending the money to your old bank account. That doesn't work like, oh, I'm switching banks. Like, there's not a magic— like, there's not a magic, um, orb, right? Bank orb.

The all-seeing eye did not know that you changed, right?

The bank wizard, right, knows you changed your banking and we're automatically switching it. Or even you could be at the same bank. Like, we had a client that fraud, right? So the bank closed their bank account, and then the, the guy thought like his bank took care of it. No, the bank doesn't take care of that. Sure, for a few days they were probably seeing the deposit come in and putting it in the new account. Then all of a sudden the guy's like, oh, I'm not getting my money. So I go, well, what changed? He goes, oh, I got a new bank account. To just now, I sent 2 people the change form and they're like, why do I have to fill this out? I go, you have to change your bank. And then one guy wants to check not only changing the bank account, it's a different corporation. I go, we can't do that. The corporation is like ABC Incorporated, right? You can't send me a check for XYZ Incorporated. I go, we can't do that. The paperwork and the federal tax— what's the federal tax ID for this one? He goes, oh, it's a different corporation. I go, we have to do all new paperwork. Because, oh, I don't want the money. He goes, just switch the bank account. I go, you can't do that. And I'm trying to explain to them, like, right, you get it.

But I get it. It makes— I mean, you can't just do that with your payroll check.

Well, it's not just that.

I'm just saying you can't do that with anything. You just— you can't just go change your account. And the corporation and then expect to get paid, right? I don't care what service you— you aren't going to get paid from PayPal, you're not going to get paid from Stripe, blah blah blah blah blah, right? You got to know the matter.

And they also check, which people don't understand, your EIN number.

It doesn't match, you're not really not going to get it, right?

They match the credit card. This is another thing we talked about with credit card processing. The main thing with your merchant account, keep it— you should be— if you have a merchant account You should be looking at your— or whatever business you're in, you should be looking at your bank account every day, looking at the deposits, what's going in, what's, what's coming out. If you see something that doesn't look right, that's when you need to call whoever it is that you need to call. And if you switch your bank account or you decide like, oh, I'm going to form a new corporation for whatever reason, and people do that. I mean, I know the little tricks people do. You know, for a while it was like a big thing. A few years ago, people— there was like a little trick, like, oh, you could write off like massive losses for 3 years, and then after that, like, you might get investigated by the IRS. So the person would open up a business, maybe they would claim it was a loss, all 3 claims, claim losses all 3 years, like, oh, everything's a loss. Even though whatever, they're probably just building it up and investing money and taking it all out. There's a loss on paper, right? A paper loss. And then after 3 years, you can't keep doing that. The IRS is going to come knock on your door. So what would they do? Oh, we got to get a new corporation. So, and people still try, and people still try to do that now. They're getting trouble in the company or they're getting sued. They're like, okay, well, we'll just bag that corp and open a new corp. Yeah, okay, well, you can do that, but we got to do new paperwork. It's not like, oh, you just call us on the phone, here's the check. No, no, no, no, no, it's got to be the same corp. Yeah, you can't change the checking account from ABC to XYZ Incorporated. No can do. You can't do that. You got to keep an eye. If you see a chargeback, money coming out of your account, You call somebody, you don't wait a week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks ago. Oh, I see there was some deductions for $500. What was that? Yeah, you got to watch your— you got to watch what's going on in your account.

Yeah, I know we talk about that all the time.

No, I told you, a guy showed me a merchant statement this morning, 30,000 transactions on it. Not exactly, right? So, so the guy goes, well, how do we find out where that came from? So let's ask them a bunch of questions. I go log into your Gateway, they looked and they saw somebody, they called up customer service and somebody uploaded a batch who was logged into the system. They found out who's— who logged in, the IP address, who did that belong to, blah blah blah blah blah. Now there's a big problem because they got a warning from the credit card processor. Somebody thought that they could just upload a— upload a— don't— do not give anyone that is access to your login credentials for your gateway. Do not do that.

And if you see activity, like, you know, obviously, if you do, you should be very— you got to trust that person, right?

But I'm not saying that. But also, if you're getting a bunch of emails showing a bunch of transactions, right, going through your account, because every time someone does a purchase or there's a card authorized on your gateway, it generates an email. Someone should be monitoring that email. If you see too many emails, you got to call somebody. You would— if they literally would have called Authorize.net when they saw that happening, they could have called them up, said, hey man, shut my account off right now. But nobody did that. Nobody was monitoring the email. When they went and checked it, when I was on the phone with them, it was— it's going to be a legal mumbo jumbo and they got to get a new merchant account. But you know, that's it. So just remember the total fees. Find all the fees, count your daily fees, look at the end of the month fees, look at the total amount of fees. Don't just look at, you know, because like I said, sometimes it's a little bit is collected daily and then some more at the end of the month, or it's all at the end of the month. Whatever the total is, take the total, divide by sales, get your answer. You can always book an appointment with us, text the word book to 954-827-9818, and, or go to b2bvault.info, hit apply, get a merchant account, or fill out a form on the bottom of the page and get in touch with us. If you have a question, you can leave it in the comments of the podcast or send us an e— an email, uh, press@b2bvault.info. We're good.

For all you spammers out there, go ahead. We, you know, doesn't matter.

It's all good. So everybody, peace out. Carpe diem. Have a great weekend. Peace. Enjoy the weekend. FinTech Friday, we're out.

Peace, Mama. Peace out, y'all. You in that peace out, y'all. Hello everyone, we'd like to take this time to thank our sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We'd also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to reach Allen or myself, head over to b2bvault.info where you'll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you're interested in becoming a sponsor. If you'd like to sign up for a merchant account, Click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of B2BVault.info, where you'll answer a few questions, and you'll be on your way to processing payments in no time. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening.