Surcharging lets you recover credit card processing costs by adding a 3% fee to applicable card payments. This guide covers how to enable surcharging for your whole system, what happens to documents that already exist, and how to override the fee for individual invoices when needed.
Enabling Surcharging for Your System
Surcharging is turned on once, in your system settings, and then applies across your account.
Click Settings in your main menu.
Open System Settings, then select the Payment tab.
Turn on Enable Surcharging. The system adds a 3% fee to all credit card transactions, except in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma. Debit card surcharging isn't allowed, so debit payments are not affected.
Credit card payments now have the fee applied by default, unless you turn it off for a specific invoice.
Invoices and Quotes Created Before You Enabled Surcharging
Turning surcharging on applies to documents created from that point forward. Any invoice or quote that already existed will not pick up credit card fees automatically.
To add fees to an existing invoice, open the invoice, go to the options dropdown, and choose Apply credit card fees.
This is the most common reason a customer isn't presented with the surcharge when entering a card — the invoice predates the setting.
Overriding Surcharging for a Single Invoice
You can waive the surcharge on any individual invoice without changing your system-wide setting.
Open the customer's invoice.
Find the Apply Credit Card Fees option and uncheck the box to remove the surcharge for this invoice.
Confirm Apply Credit Card Fees is unchecked before sending the invoice. The 3% fee won't be added, and it won't appear as a line item.
If the invoice has already been paid, changing this setting has no effect on it.
Reporting Impact: How Surcharging Affects Job Margin
Surcharging has a side effect on job margin reporting that's worth understanding before you review profitability reports on surcharged jobs.
When a surcharge is added as a line item, its cost equals its price. That increases Total Sales without adding any profit, which dilutes the reported margin percentage on the job — the number looks lower than the actual margin on the underlying work.
Floorzap's job reporting does not currently adjust for this. To keep the surcharge out of commission calculations, use the custom commissions feature, which lets you exclude the surcharge line from the commission basis.
If accurate margin reporting on surcharged jobs matters to your workflow, factor the surcharge line in when reviewing job profitability reports.