How to Decode Your Card Processor’s Monthly Statement Without Losing Your Sanity

If you’ve ever opened your card processor’s monthly statement and felt like you’d accidentally stumbled into a maths exam you didn’t study for, don’t worry, you’re not alone. These things are a strange mix of hieroglyphics and fine print, and yet they contain one of the most important numbers for your business: how much money actually ends up in your bank.

So, let’s break it down without the jargon headache.

The Big Picture: What You’re Actually Looking At

Your statement is essentially a story of all the money that passed through your card machine or online checkout. It starts with the headline acts: the total card sales, the number of transactions, and any refunds or chargebacks. Then it gets to the less glamorous part: fees. Lots of them.

You’ll usually see a few main characters here:

• The merchant service charge, the processor’s slice of every sale.
• The interchange fee, which is money passed to the customer’s bank.
• The scheme fee, which keeps Visa, Mastercard and friends in business.

Add them up (plus the odd ‘admin’ or ‘PCI compliance’ fee for good measure) and you arrive at your total cost of accepting payments.

The Number That Matters Most

Forget the spaghetti of line items for a moment. The most important figure is your effective rate, which is the total fees you’ve paid divided by the total sales you’ve taken.

Example: if you took £30,000 in card payments and paid £450 in fees, your effective rate is 1.5%. That’s the number to keep an eye on month after month. If it creeps higher without a good reason, it’s time to ask questions.

Where Things Get Sneaky

Not all cards cost the same. Debit cards are usually cheaper, while credit, commercial, and international cards often carry higher fees. If your customer base is heavy on international shoppers or corporate cards, you could see your effective rate climb fast.

And then there are the “mystery extras”: monthly minimum fees you don’t hit, chargeback fees, or compliance charges that seem to exist purely to test your patience. These add up quietly in the background.

Also make sure to check the split between in-store, ‘cardholder not present’ (CNP) and ecommerce transactions. The latter two can typically attract a surcharge or premium on top of any standard, intra-regional or inter-regional card transaction fees. If you’re accepting USD-denominated corporate credit cards online from overseas cardholders (for example), you may start to see overall transaction fees tipping into 4-5% territory (or even more!).

The Sanity Check

Finally, don’t forget to check that the money showing as “net settlement” on the statement actually matches what’s landed in your bank. It sounds obvious, but with batching delays and processing times, the numbers don’t always line up neatly.

Three Takeaways for UK SMEs

• Know your effective rate. Forget the long list of charges—this single percentage tells you what you’re really paying.
• Watch for patterns. If certain card types or extra fees are pushing up costs, you’ll know where to focus your negotiations or where to shop around.
• Reconcile regularly. Match processor statements to your bank deposits so no pennies go missing in the shuffle.

Mastering your monthly statement won’t make it exciting—but it will make sure you keep more of your hard-earned money, and that’s always worth the effort.

A Better Way

If you’ve followed the steps above and been horrified by the fees that you’re paying, don’t fret, there’s an easier way to get on top of ‘card cost-creep’ and retain more of your hard-earned revenue, improve settlement times and offer your customers more payment methods to choose from at checkout.

Contact the team at Stable for a quick, no-obligation card statement audit - all we need is your most recent month’s card terminal/processor statement(s) and we will feed them into our proprietary calculator to provide you with a simple report summarising how much you’re currently paying for different card or transaction types, and benchmark them against typical rates to highlight where there are opportunities to save money.

If you want to take action off the back of this audit, we’ll then be able to connect you with multiple providers offering better rates and services to make sure the last thing holding your business back is paying too much to get paid.