Central Payment Salesman: Daniel T. 1% effective rate? Hah! Try 10% right out of the box. Colorado Springs Colorado

Our company was approached by a salesman for Central Payment for credit card processing.  As the office manager for this roofing company for the past ten years, I've endured the brain damage of changing processors 3 times already and eventually settled on Intuit which has been a very good experience.

The salesman for Central Payment insisted that he could beat the rates of using Intuit hands down.  When I told him that lower discount rates aren't necessarily what matters most if the company charges a lot of other fees, he insisted that the other extraneous fees were minimal.  Througout the whole conversation with him, I mentioned a dozen times, at least, that almost all of our customers who pay by credit card pay over the phone so our discount rates are always non-qualified.  He insisted that it didn't matter and that we would save half the costs by switching to Central Payment.  At least a half dozen times I asked about all the fees besides swipe rates that we would have to pay,ie., processing machines and those costs, monthly fees for whatever, acess fees from the Big Three, ect.  He insisted that with the  discount rates so low, all the extraneous fees would not cause our effective rate (the cost when all the fees are paid at the end of the month) to be higher than what we were paying with Intuit and would, in fact, be lower.  He took our last statement from Intuit, crunched some numbers and declared that if we had been using Central Payment, we would have paid a 1% effective rate.

I challenged that immediately.  No processing company can make a profit if total effective rates were at 1%.  It was too good to be true and I told him that.  We were paying a total effective rate of about 3.75% with Intuit which is actually quite good.  The monthly fee is $19.95 and we have a once-per-year charge of $100 for PCI compliance and 25-cent batch fees.  No other fees besides that.  The USB swiper we bought was less than $100 and the mobile swiper was free.  In all, very reasonable.  

Long story short, the owner of the company decided to give Central Payment a try against my wishes.  Well, you guessed it:  after 1 month, we've paid for 2 credit card machines (desktop and mobile) we didn't need (we had a Verifone swiper that was still fairly new and would have needed nothing more than to be programmed to Central Payment), first and last month and the current month rent on them, shipping (and now return shipping), monthly insurance on them, and a gateway access fee.  Now we'll have a $550 charge to cancel the service.

Not adding in the cost of the swipers, the total effective rate for processing $10,000 was 3.75%, same as Intiut but with extra steps that the QuickBooks integration eliminates.  With the monthly machine rental, not including all the charges to just get set up with the machines, the rate goes to 10%.  That's right, 10%!

I called the salesman to ask him what the heck?  Of course, he backpedaled and said he didn't know I meant an effective rate that included the cost of the swipers and insurance and all that.  He was only referring to processing rates, he said.  I had asked him so many times about all the fees they would charge that would impact the effective rate, so there's no way he didn't know what I meant.  He chose to lie, pure and simple.  Central Payment cannot compete with Intuit or even WorldPay whom we had been with prior to Intuit.  The salesman knew it and deliberately withheld information about the cost of renting their stupid machines which we didn't need to do.

Well, the boss got his lesson.  We're cancelling and returning to Intuit.  We'll pay the cancellation fee and send the machines back.  All in all, a very expensive lesson.  

Before switching to Central Payment, I had checked them out with the BBB.  One expects a lot of complaints on any national company's record, even those that are good.  So, I was not surprised to see quite a few complaints listed on the BBB.  As I scanned the complaints, one of the most frequent is about how Central Payment continues to take fees out of your account long after the service has been cancelled. We'll see how that goes now. We decided to close the account they have access to and will dutifully pay the cancellation fee by check.