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ChapterTitle
Insights and Expertise

period, classified once, with gross fees, credits and test corpus, archived at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21761714
net fees shown separately rather than collapsed into and maintained at liftedpayments.com/payment-process-
one total. ing-statement-audit. It is not an accounting opinion, an
• State the rounding rule and the precision. interchange-qualification determination, or a guarantee
of savings.
• State what is excluded and why, naming any charge
billed off this statement, a direct American Express Take the word neutral skeptically, because I sell merchant
agreement being the common one. processing. It is not the publisher that is neutral; it is the
• State whether the month is comparable at all, because artifact. Every equation and rejection case is published
a dormant month, an annual charge landing in one and re-runnable, so anyone can prove me wrong without
cycle, or a surcharge settling inside volume each pro- my cooperation.
duce a rate that should not be ranked against any-
thing. I would rather the industry argue about the definitions
• And state what the audit does not establish. than keep quietly using four of them. When a merchant
can see the basis, reproduce the math and understand
the limits, a statement audit survives the merchant's ac-
Six lines. A competitor who declares them can be checked. countant, the incumbent's rebuttal and a second look six
One who will not has told you something. months later.

Doing this costs no proprietary pricing and no merchant
data—only the definitions, the equations, the rounding Daniel Wilson Kemp is founder and CEO of Lifted Holdings. Lifted
rules and the limits, versioned so later changes are visible. Payments provides merchant processing and builds payment software,
including smart-terminal applications, gateway workflows, POS inte-
Lifted Payments published its own model on those terms grations and custom payment services. He writes about pricing trans-
under CC BY 4.0, with a spreadsheet template, JSON Sche- parency and reproducible measurement in the acquiring channel. Learn
ma, decimal-safe validator, methodology and a synthetic more at liftedpayments.com.