The gap is where the money goes. Scheme fees. Commercial card surcharges. Pence per transaction. Authorisation fees. Gateway charges. PCI charges. Minimum monthly service charges. None of it is hidden exactly, but none of it is on the front page either.  We’ll work it out for you, free, and put it in writing.

We work with more than one payment provider and we’ll recommend the one that fits your business, not the one that fits ours. What matters is different for a 200-cover restaurant, a wet-led pub and a hotel front desk.

And if you’re locked into a contract, there may be a contribution of up to £3,000 towards your existing provider’s exit fee. The audit tells you whether that’s worth having.

Whether you move or not is entirely up to you. The audit is yours either way.

It adds up faster than you’d think

One Northern Ireland bar and restaurant saved several thousand pounds a year in card fees after switching provider. Nothing about how they trade changed — same tills, same customers, same card machines on the bar.

A well-known local hotel came to us on an effective rate of 2.49% — the real figure, total charges divided by card turnover, not the rate on the front of their contract. The reason turned out to be that nearly four in five of their transactions were commercial cards: the virtual cards the big travel sites issue to settle a room, which carry a premium rate. Nobody had ever pointed it out. It was costing them thousands a year on trade they’d already won.

Neither business went looking for that. Somebody read their statement properly.

What you get

Send us one recent merchant statement. We’ll come back within three working days with a short written report covering:

•      Your real effective rate — total charges divided by card turnover. One number. Most operators have never seen it.

•      Where the money actually goes — every line on the statement, explained in plain English.

•      Your card mix — debit, credit, commercial and international. Commercial cards are usually the hidden cost, and hotels taking bookings through the big travel sites are often paying a premium on most of their trade without knowing it.

•      Your transaction count and average sale — because if you’re paying pence per transaction, how you take payments matters as much as what rate you’re on. It’s also where bar tabs and pre-authorisation can quietly cut the bill.

•      Your contract position — what term you’re on, what notice you owe, what leaving would cost.

•      What the same trade would cost on a better deal — like for like, with the annual saving in pounds.

No jargon. No obligation. If you’re already on a keen rate, we’ll say so — that’s a useful answer too.

Why we’re doing this

We’ve been fitting tills and card terminals in Northern Ireland hospitality for years, and the same conversation comes up every time: nobody knows what they’re paying. It isn’t carelessness — statements are written to be filed, not read. Hospitality Ulster members told us they weren’t happy with their card providers. This is the honest starting point. Find out where you stand first; decide what to do about it second.

The rate is only half of it

Once we’ve read your statement, most of the conversation stops being about rates and starts being about the twenty minutes a night your staff lose, or the bar tab nobody closed.

What we can put in front of Hospitality Ulster members:

•      Order and pay at the table, on one device. Take the order tableside, it lands in the kitchen, the card is taken there and then. No walking back to a fixed till, no double keying, no queue at the bar.

•      Bar tabs without the bad debt. Pre-authorise a card when the tab opens. The tab stays open, the money is secured, and nobody walks. The same mechanism handles booking deposits and minimum spends.

•      Loyalty with no app to download. Passes that live in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, tied to the card the customer already pays with. Nothing to install, so people actually use it.

•      Split bills, tips and refunds handled on the machine — including refunds locked behind a PIN, so a Saturday-night refund isn’t a Monday-morning problem.

•      Your money in the morning. Card takings land in your account at 10am the next working day as standard, and there’s an upgrade that pays out even on weekends and bank holidays — which matters more in this trade than in most.

•      A till that stays up. 99.99% uptime, with 4G backup when the wifi drops. Nothing costs a Friday night like a terminal that won’t take a card.

•      Less PCI to worry about. End-to-end encryption on the hardware cuts how much of the compliance burden lands on you — and PCI non-compliance charges are one of the fees we find most often on a statement.

•      Reporting you can actually ask questions of. Plain-English answers about your own numbers, instead of exporting a spreadsheet you’ll never open.

•      Subscription-free EPOS. Available to Hospitality Ulster members. Ask us how it applies to your business.

Click here to find out more