What the Professionals in Your Corner Should Know About How You Get Paid

If you have a CPA, an attorney, or a commercial banker, you probably trust them to look out for your business. And most of them do. But there's one area that almost always gets skipped in those conversations: how you actually collect money from your customers.

Payment processing sounds like a back-office issue. It's not. For most small businesses, it's one of the top three operating costs — and it's one of the few costs that has real room to move if someone is paying attention to it.

The problem is that most business advisors don't specialize in payments. They're focused on taxes, legal structure, financing, or balance sheet. That's the right focus for their lane. But it creates a gap.

What gets missed

Here's what I see consistently: a business owner is paying more than they should to process payments, and nobody on their advisory team flagged it because nobody thought to look. The processing statement comes in every month, the money goes out, and it gets treated as a fixed cost.

It's not a fixed cost. The fees you pay to process credit and debit cards depend on your pricing model, your processor's markup, the card mix your customers use, and whether your account is set up correctly for your business type. Any one of those can be off — and when they're off, it costs real money every month.

A CPA reviewing your P&L might see "merchant services" as a line item and assume it's reasonable. An attorney structuring your entity won't have a reason to ask about it. A banker approving your loan looks at cash flow, not processing rates. None of them are doing anything wrong. This is just a blind spot that falls between disciplines.

Why it matters to your advisor relationships

The advisors who refer business to each other — CPAs, attorneys, financial consultants, insurance agents — are usually trying to make sure their clients have the full picture. If you're working with professionals who think that way, it's worth letting them know where payments fit.

A few things worth sharing with them:

Processing fees are deductible, but the rate itself is negotiable. There's a difference between a cost you can write off and a cost you can actually reduce.

The pricing model matters more than the rate you were quoted. Flat-rate pricing is simple but almost always more expensive than interchange-plus for businesses with any real volume.

Dual pricing — where customers pay differently based on how they pay — is legal in all 50 states and increasingly common. Whether it's right for a specific business depends on customer mix and industry. It's worth understanding before dismissing it.

Switching processors has a cost, but so does staying. An advisor who helps a client think through that trade-off is doing their job well.

What a good conversation looks like

You don't need your CPA to become a payments expert. But a quick "has anyone reviewed your processing setup recently?" question in a year-end meeting can open a door that saves a client real money.

The same goes the other direction. If you're a business owner and your CPA, attorney, or banker has never brought this up, it's worth raising it yourself. Ask them: "Is there someone you'd trust to review our payment setup?" If they have a name, great. If they don't, that's useful information too.

I've spent 16 years in merchant services, working with businesses across a wide range of industries and transaction volumes. The questions I hear most often from clients aren't complicated — they just weren't being asked by anyone.

If you're a business owner wondering whether your processing setup is actually costing you more than it should, I'm happy to take a look. No pressure, no commitment. Just a straightforward conversation about what you're paying and whether it makes sense.

And if you're a CPA, attorney, or financial advisor looking for someone you can send clients to for an honest payments review, feel free to reach out. I work the same way with referral partners as I do with clients — direct, no jargon, and focused on what actually makes sense for the business.

Reach out directly: diane@fraiettafinancialgroup.com | fraiettafinancialgroup.com