Credit card batches must be sent to the processor within 24-hours or every transaction in the batch will downgrade. Failing to clear your batch every day can be a very costly mistake. For example, imagine that you've processed $8,000 worth of credit card transactions and you forget to clear batch. The next day you send the batch to the processor, but instead of being charged the qualified rate of 1.7%, the transactions downgrade to 2.5%. That's a difference of $64 just for not clearing your batch in the allotted time. Providers offer something called auto-batch close. As the name implies, this feature will automatically close credit card batches when there are transactions that need to be settled. There's no charge for this service and it will help you avoid expensive downgrades.

Punching-in transactions on a card-present merchant account

If your merchant account was issued under the how to start a payment processing company assumption that you'll be processing transaction when the credit card and the customer are present, you were given what's called a card-present account. Card-present accounts have lower rates when you're swiping credit cards, but all transactions that are manually entered will automatically downgrade. This is a common problem for retail businesses that also process catalog of Internet orders through the same machine. All keyed-in transactions will downgrade to a higher rate. The solution to this problem is to open a card-not-present merchant account.