A credit card surcharge is an extra charge that customers pay on top of the price of goods of services. This surcharge applies when customers choose to pay with a credit card such as Visa or MasterCard. Surcharge value is added on the Total Value including GST.
In Ascora, you can set your credit card surcharge by going to Administration → Payments & Tax
Click Add to add Mastercard or Visa as your payment method but if you've already added this in the past, you can edit the surcharge by clicking Edit beside the payment method.
In the following example, we set Mastercard as payment method with a surcharge of 1.75% and surcharge amount of $0.30.
Note: You can also select your surcharge account income account from the same screen.
Sample Scenario
Let's use the following invoice (see image below) as an example to explain how surcharges work. This invoice has a total of $1,734.70 and total amount paid by the customer using a Mastercard credit card is $1,765.36 (refer to the right part of the image).
Surcharge of $30.36 + fee of $0.30 was added bringing the total amount paid by the customer to $1,765.36.
Calculation: Invoice Total Inc GST $1,734.70 + Surcharge of 1.75% which is $30.36 + fee of $0.30 =Total: $1,765.36
Breakdown for the Accounting Side
| Invoice total including GST | $1,734.70 | Original Invoice Value |
Add Surcharge of 1.75% | $30.66 | Ascora Calculated Surcharge |
Total Stripe Value | $1,765.36 | Matches value processed by Stripe |
Deposit Amount | $1,734.17 | From bank feed |
Stripe Value Less calculated charge | $17,34.17 | Amounts match expected value above – 1.75% + $0.30 = $31.19 |
In this example, the surcharge is added to the total invoice value including GST. So this invoice of $1,734.70 would become $1,765.05 with 1.75% surcharge.
The company is then charged 1.75% plus $0.30 for the transaction of $1,765.05 so that would be $31.19.
Total payment collected of $1,765.36 - $31.19 = $1,734.17 (which is the total amount the company receives.)
Note: It's important that this is transferred usually to a clearing account as all invoices paid for in a day are transferred in a lump sum instead of separate transactions for each invoice so you are never matching 1 to 1 on the bank feed side of things.