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One Simple Change to Boost Your Bottom Line

Poring over line items to make cuts in a budget is tedious, stressful and time consuming. But as every small business owner knows, it’s also necessary.

And if you’re looking at making staff changes, it can be downright painful. But Jim Pacifico, founder of World Class Financial Services, says there’s one item that’s simple and painless to adjust—your credit card fees.

“People don’t pay attention to them,” he says. “They pass right by it in their budget, and if the P&L isn’t benchmarked for them and that number doesn’t show, they aren’t going to know.”

“This is an area in which you can renegotiate rates, save your business’s money, and not have to cut costs or affect your guest experience.”

Negotiating Your Rates

World Class Financial Services offers financial support to the salon and spa industry with accounting, benchmarking and analysis of financial statements.

Credit card fees, which can range a full percent or more, are an area in which Pacifico and his team regularly see potential savings. For a salon doing $250K in credit cards, just a half a percentage point is $1,250 in savings.

Lower-volume salons should be just as aggressive in contacting their credit card companies: “It’s not the volume of the salon itself,” Pacifico says. “It’s how much is being charged to credit cards.”

Jim Pacifico, World Class Financial Services

Pacifico says he has seen credit card fees go up into the 3 percent range, which can really impact a bottom line, depending on how much credit card usage is happening in the business.

“The major portion of business is done on credit cards—75 to 80 percent,” he says. “If you’re a multi-million-dollar salon, .7 percent could mean a lot of money to you.”

Rates change every 10-12 months, so Pacifico recommends negotiating with your bank annually. And if your business is growing rapidly, every six months.

We’ve done the homework for you

If you’re like most incredibly busy salon owners, the thought of getting on the phone for hours and renegotiating your credit card rates is probably giving you stress hives already. But you don’t have to worry: as a SalonBiz customer, we have people here to help you.

Our rates are yours

SalonBiz partners with PaySimple to get the lowest rate available for salons that process charges through the software. This can save a salon $150-$300 per month off the bat.

When you process cards through SalonBiz, you can also save on the hidden costs and fees of outside processors, not to mention streamlining your business.

Lauren Blake, manager at Berenice’s Salon in Denver, CO, knows the practical difference that streamlining can make.

“I worked at another location where we used a separate systems. It seemed too easy to have errors: you have to type in the sale, swipe the card, make sure it matches, then at the end of the day manually enter everything and make sure all your charges match. It added extra steps to everything. It’s way nicer to now have it all in one system.”

Berenices Salon Website

Imagine all of your reports, all in one place. No more cumbersome batching out with separate machines at the end of the day and then manually entering your credit card totals into your different systems. Imagine one streamlined process at checkout that also pulls in the numbers for your online gift card sales.

Processing credit cards through SalonBiz makes that happen.

5 Steps to Credit Card Savings

It used to be a huge, painful process to shop around and find a new credit card processor, change out your machines, figure out how to physically batch out, how to run reports, and how use it with your accounting system. Back in the old days, a credit card company switch could take weeks or months, which is why a lot of salons hesitate to change anything.

But with SalonBiz, we’ve already done the work for you.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Contact our merchant services provider, PaySimple. They can answer all your questions and explain the whole process for you.
  2. Complete the online application. PaySimple can help you get all the documents finalized and approved in as little as 48 hours.
  3. Order hardware and delivery. Once you’ve placed your hardware order, it doesn’t take long for your new processing machine(s) to arrive at your salon.
  4. Call SalonBiz to activate. Call SalonBiz to activate the machines and integrate with SalonBiz software.
  5. Start processing cards, knowing your workflow was just simplified and you’re saving money on every transaction.

Each day that goes by without renegotiating your rates is money lost, and going into the busiest part of the year with lower rates and a streamlined system can really make a huge difference in both time and money.

Give us a call and we’ll get you set up in no time.

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