Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Settling a terminal, also known as "batching", is when a merchant sends their completed transactions for the day to their acquiring bank for payment.

When you have a credit card terminal for your merchant account, be sure to batch out your terminal every night that you have any transactions for the day.  When you set up your account, make sure you ask for the autobatch feature (this feature will automatically batch your terminal at a specific time each day).

Why is it important to batch?  If you do not batch a transaction within 48 hours (sometimes 24 hours depending on the company you process with), all of the transactions that were not batched on time will downgrade to the non qualified rate!

Beware of companies who tell you not to set up autobatch.  They will give you arguments telling you that you shouldn`t rely on autobatch because it may not go out, or the phone line may be down at the time you try to autobatch, etc.  The reality is, they hope that you forget to batch and have your transactions all downgrade.

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Oliver Mupas
United Bank Card
866-207-6007 ext 303
omupas@ubcnetworkonline.com