Managing commissions within the merchant services and payment processing industry can rapidly become a significant drain on operational effectiveness. As a key component of your business model, the accurate tracking and reconciliation of terminal sales and transaction commissions is essential. But all too often, issues arise – hampering your ability to scale and impacting the relationship that you’re able to establish and maintain with your active agents.
In this article, we’ll explore five of the key issues that can commonly occur when it comes to the effective management of payment processing commissions – and suggest a few easy fixes that you might like to consider implementing.
1. Failure To Automate
There’s a reason that automation tools have dominated within the world of SaaS for the last decade. Extending your capacity in the most reliable and seamless way, automation boosts your bottom line twice: once as it improves your efficiency and again with the reduction you can expect to see in errors.
The transactional world of payment processing and merchant services is a particularly data heavy industry. Working manually with spreadsheets is one solution – but this approach can only scale so far, and ultimately, is going to end up hampering your ability to grow (as well as frustrating your staff and carrying the potential to eat into huge amounts of their time and capacity.)
With so many inputting factors coming into play (especially with multiple payment processors involved) the risk of human error is also fairly significant – and has the potential to be costly. Automation helps solve these problems, leveraging AI and machine learning to provide a truly dependable tracking and management system. Within the realm of commission, it enables you to create workflows that are a match for growing future ambitions.
In the case of Commissionly, imported transactional data will automatically map your agents to the customers MID number, Name or Code. This alone can save untold hours of manual effort. Similarly, in the case of your transaction report commissions, any splits that are required between agents can be set up and handled automatically – reducing the margin for error and giving your team one less process to factor into their individual workflows.
2. Missed Opportunities To Gain Insight From Data
As previously mentioned, the payment processing and merchant services sector is a data-heavy space, and this can be framed as a challenge to be mitigated – or as an untapped benefit, ready for careful leverage. The sheer amount of information generated by the actions of your agents unlocks the opportunity for deep, actionable insight and ongoing operational efficiencies.
In order to fully capitalize on this valuable stream of data, you’ll need a way to generate clear reports that can highlight areas of potential and flag up issues that require attention or improvement. Commissionly helps make this process simple, connecting directly to your CRM or a sales platform via a wide range of integrations, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Monday and Zapier. You can also sync to any system leveraging Rest APIs. The outcome? Clarity and control over your data – showing you the next best step, via custom reporting.
3. Ineffective Data Import
When it comes to mapping and recording transaction commissions (as well as recording additional data points such as terminal sales) one necessity really stands out: flexibility at scale. Business models are unique, and likely in ongoing states of evolution and flux. As a result, transaction reports need the ability to accurately accommodate a wider range of data points. Reports should also be easy to customize, amend and reconfigure.
Within the realm of payment processing, a solution that enables you to easily track and attribute data points such as customer MID numbers, Names or Codes. This is where flexible, customer templating comes into its own. Commissionly offers the ability to structure your pay terminal commissions based on any combination of terminal type, monthly charge, contract length add ons and more.
4. Inefficient Clawback Processes
Claw back is a necessary evil, and while it’s something we all hope to minimise the need for, the importance of an effective claw back process if a merchant does churn cannot be overstated. Once again, the key word here is scale – as your number of operational agents grows, your ability to keep track of this process with any degree of efficiency or accuracy diminishes.
Improvements to your clawback procedure is about more than just ensuring your own operational efficiency and profitability – it can also play a key role in keeping your agents motivated and informed. Having a dedicated solution in place here plays a role in helping your business attain wider transparency in this field. Additionally, there are clear benefits to having an automated clawback process that syncs into wider reporting.
5. Poor Communication Of Progress And Targets To Agents
We’ve previously touched on transparency, but it should be stressed that the benefits here go beyond the realm of clawbacks. There are big benefits linked to better communication of progress and targets more broadly.
Beyond this, if many other previously time-consuming areas of commission tracking, attribution and management have been automated and optimized, the time won back can be reinvested into the training, guidance and assistance of agents. This additional contact and education can be optimized via the clarity brought by better reporting and more clearly illuminated trends.
One outcome of working with a dedicated commission management solution such as Commissionly is the ability to set realistic expectations of progression. Forecasted targets can be used to help motivate and (crucially) retain your agents – a big factor in their ongoing loyalty and success with you! Success here means a reduction in your ongoing acquisition costs, and a more experienced and effective agent base.
Side Step Common Payment Processing Commission Issues
As this article has shown, the payments processing industry is plagued by a small handful of
Common (but persistent) commissioning headaches. By taking action to remedy these problems and apply a long term solution, some significant advantages can be unlocked – unlocking optimized procedures, more internal efficiencies, boosted revenues and valuable insight into ongoing operational performance.
A few tweaks to your operations within the realm of payment processing commission have the impact to send positive, profitable ripples across all levels of your business. With a vertical specialism in the payment processing commissions sector, Commissionly represents the ideal solution for delivering these changes – bringing benefits that extend far beyond your commissioning departments, via increased efficiency, improved forecasting and data-backed decision making.