ACH or Automated Clearing House is one of the largest, safest, and most reliable types of payment collection forms. Setting up ACH payments is a simple process that just involves you collecting your client’s banking data – their accounting and routing number.
Today, many gym owners are unaware of the financial advantages of collecting payments via ACH (E-Check) over credit cards. The truth is many payment processors don’t want you to know this fact so they can take more money out of your pocket. When you accept a credit card payment, such as Visa or MasterCard, you’re charged a percentage of a transaction rather than a flat fee. Since some processors can charge as much as 3.5% for a transaction, the fees can really add up quick.
At RhinoFit, we teach our clients NOT to give away a percentage of your hard-earned money if you don’t have to. This holds especially true for gym owners who process a lot of high-ticket transactions. With high-ticket amounts, credit card transactions could cost you up to $5 a transaction. By contrast, with our ACH payment option you only pay a flat rate of $0.50 a transaction regardless of your ticket amount. By implementing this payment option, you can cut your processing fees by 75% or more.
Below is an example of a gym owner who implemented the ACH payment option, saving $14,000 a year in processing fees.
Maximize Your Collection Rates with ACH Payments
Besides saving you money, another great benefit of using the ACH payment option is that collection rates are much higher compared to credit cards. Credit card transactions can be declined if a credit card is maxed out, reported lost or stolen, or if the card has expired. For this reason, credit card declines occur 4 – 10 times more often than ACH returns. After working with hundreds of businesses and analyzing key trends, we find ACH returns only occur 2 – 4% of the time while credit card decline rates can run 8 – 20%. This is why ACH is a much better method for taking payments and helps add to your bottom line. You will also save valuable time from not having to track down your clients for failed or missed payments.
To ensure you’re not leaving any money on the table, it’s important that you not only accept the correct payment option, but that you also retry any failed payments. Since ACH payments are successfully collected about 60% of the time on your customer’s second ACH draft, you can raise your overall revenue stream by as much as 5 – 10%. By using ACH and re-trying failed payments, you can add hundreds of dollars to your bottom line and eliminate a lot of headaches chasing down clients.
Below is example of the money you can save by implementing ACH payments using a sample size of 100 clients with an average ticket amount of $100.
