Business Owners: Tracking Credit Card Receipts

We're moving around with some of the business and they are looking to bring some more things in house. Anyone handle a crap ton of credit card transactions? How do you track the merchant copy of the credit card slip the customer signed. Right now they get mailed to a 3rd party who keeps the paper copies on file, I've been asked to find some scanner/program that we can scan them all and make them searchable by name, amount, cc number, etc. On a slow day we have 1200 CC transactions across all 9 locations, busy days can be 3,000+

 

Why not go to a digital copy with the little signing pads? It would make storage much easier and easily enable searching by card number, etc. If you were really anal you could run paper reports and store them in a secure location. I bet you could even get the hardware and software cheaply or even free if you negotiate it with your processor (or move to a different one).

 

Your CC processing service doesn't compile that for you?

 

last company I worked for used expensewire.com don't know if that is something that would work for you

 

I don’t process nearly that many transactions, but we haven’t given anyone a paper receipt since 2013. Our processing co can send us detailed reports whenever we need them.

 

Has your company done a cost/benefit analysis to see how much it will cost to bring this in house? Or are they just making this decision out of the blue?

In some cases it makes sense to bring certain things in house, and outsource others. Most places I have worked have done a mixture of both.

With the number of transactions and scanning you are talking about, you would need a new department and many bodies to handle that volume. Not to mention the cost of the hardware and storage/backups.

 

The current system is the 3rd party keeps them in paper format and when we have a charge back we need to request they pull the paper copy and scan it to us. We might have 30 or so chargebacks a month so we don't have to search often.

I over heard the conversation about this and they decided I'd be great to find a solution. My idea got the "weeellll, let's see what other solutions there are" Each location has scan snap scanner which does a great job for full size papers and the small amount of receipt sizes I use. Unless the individual receipts don't scan well in large numbers I don't see why we can't use them.

 

This is all separate from the actual processor stuff. I can pull the reports and mine data, that's not the problem. We need to store the physical signed copies from be guests. These are at restaurants which still use the paper copies of cc transactions. I'd love to move over to digital but I don't see it being used in the industry. Also the actual decision of what cc processing system to use isn't our department, only how to store the receipts they give us.

 

I'm seeing more and more restaurants are going to tablet based systems where you can sign a tablet and request a printed or email receipt.

 

What the hell business are you in that you're getting 30 charge backs a month ?

 

One where they’re doing 1200-3000 transactions a day. Chargeback rate of 0.5% ain’t bad.

 

Still doesn't answer the question

 

Sounds like you need to find a 3rd party company that actually scans the receipts instead of just keeping a paper copy on file. A company that can either provide reports on demand or allow you access to search the scanned receipts and pull your own reports. Bringing that whole operation in house sounds super expensive.

Just like the automation of Wholesale Lockbox back in the 90's. When you send your power, gas and water bill to the PO Box on the bill, it doesn't actually go to the power, gas or water company directly. It goes to a bank. Banks used to have manual departments that opened the payments, ran them through a processing machine and the money was sent to the billing company. That all got automated online and entire departments and machines were eliminated from the process. HUGE cost savings.

 

Here's an excerpt of the one of daily reports I get

Submitted Sales Transaction Summary for 01/07/2018
Transaction Amount: xxx
Batch Count: 8
Transaction Count: 3283
Average Ticket Amount: xxx

From there I can log in and view it all individually and mine data however I want from the CC processor. This data was never the problem, it's the storage of the transaction receipts, and i'll mention it to the ops team that they should look into a digital payment software that integrates into the rest of the system. Although something tells me that it would be more expensive than even physical storage of these receipts. On a busy day like above that would be about 410 tickets per location, and that doesn't include cash sales(which are irrelevant) Right now they send off the stacks every week to the 3rd party who manages them. I put out requests to some of the companies that do this but none so far offer this as a standalone service, it's all integrated into their accounting, which as far as I know there's no intent to change.

 

Sure it does. A certain small percentage of transactions will always wind up as chargebacks even if you do everything right. Fraudulent cards, people using their family’s cards without permission, people forgetting they went there, people bullshitting and scamming. Getting 30 chargebacks on 30,000 transactions is a damned sight better than 1 on 100 transactions. It’s predictable shrink you can build into your pricing model just like any other shrink.

 

I understand all that. I have my own business and got ripped off once on a fraudulent charge back.

 

Majority of the charge backs can be traced to fraudulent or stolen cards in which the person isn't liable. A very small potion can be traced to people trying to scam the company. The vast majority of the liability comes from the chip reader, the software and hardware for the chip reader isn't cheap and with out that chip reader the liability falls on us. If the chip authentication was not the cause of the charge back then we submit the signed customer receipt for the dispute. We had almost 81K CC transactions last moth and charge backs accounted for .022% of revenue totals, that's total undisputed, I forget how much we win but I'd say 50% or less. A lot of this hassle comes from just having to maintain them for records. I'm hoping like, other things we've encountered, they'll figure out bringing things in house isn't all it's cracked up to be. They went around for a while to get the chip readers and whatnot but it would cost 2x what we were losing in chip reader related chargebacks.