Charging Transaction Fees

When charging customers there's a cost associated with processing each payment that you have to pay. This money ultimately goes to the banks and card companies. It can be frustrating to lose a percentage of your income so we have an option to pass these fees onto your customers instead of absorbing them yourself.

Setup

To enable transaction fees head to Settings -> Payments and click the Transaction Fees link.

This opens a popup with two choices:

  • Disabled - this is the default. You do not add-on any transaction fees
  • Enabled - you choose a percentage and/or set amount to add to each transaction

Some countries have laws against charging fees for card or online payments. Other countries have laws against charging different rates based on how you pay. You should ensure any settings you choose here are compliant with your local laws.

For example in the UK you may charge a service fee but this must be the same regardless of how a customer pays (cash/card/bank transfer etc)

You should enter a percentage and/or fixed amount for the fee. Both are optional but you must enter at least one. For example the following are all valid:

  • 1%
  • £1.50
  • 1% + £0.25

At the bottom you should enter a description for the charge (this is what will appear on the customers invoice) and choose which charges the fees apply to.

Tax implications

Tax becomes quite complicated on transaction fees as you may be charged tax on payment fees but you may or may not need to pass this onto customers depending on your tax status.

The simple way to think about this is WodBoard will use your organisation tax settings for transaction fees. So if you have this setup to include 10% tax on your membership payments then the transaction fee will do the same.

The same should be noted for the shop where shop items can attract a different rate to payment fees.

If you require a different rate for transaction fees and memberships/shop items you could:

  • turning off tax handling in WodBoard so all amounts are shown to customers without tax and your accountant sorts it all out
  • Adjust the amount you need to charge to even out the tax differences

For UK gyms Stripe charge VAT on their payment fees - this is currently the only country where this happens. Therefore if you wanted to pass on the entire fee for the standard Stripe charge of 1.5% + 20p + VAT you would use the fixed amount option and enter 1.8% + 24p (as this includes the VAT amount). How this work out depends on if your business is vat registered or not:

  • VAT registered - the customer will see the vat in their invoice. You have paid Stripe the vat amount and passed this onto the customer
  • Not VAT registered - you can't claim the VAT back from paying Stripe so you pass the full amount of the charge onto the customer

A gotcha for gyms that use the add on tax setting where tax is added at checkout (this is common in the US) is that the transaction fee is applied to the whole amount and includes tax iteself. For example for a $100 charge with 10% tax and a 1% transaction fee:

$100 membership

$10 = 10% tax

$1.10 transaction fee (1%)

$0.11 transaction fee tax (10%)

Total charged = $111.21

Offline payments

Transaction fees are not added to offline payments.

Refunds

When refunding a customer you currently have to separately refund the transaction fee

Reporting

When enabled transaction fees impact a few reports:

  • Transaction fees appear in the finance income statement on their own line entry
  • Monthly revenue and average customer KPI value amounts include the fees.
  • Predicted revenue report does not factor in the expected total of transaction fees for future payments
  • Shop orders listing page has the shop order total and does not include any transaction fee.