Questions merchants ask us first

Three things, together: how you capture payments, how you report on them, and how you reconcile them. Capturing covers every route money takes into your business — the counter, your website, an invoice paid on terms, an order over the phone. Reporting covers the numbers your team needs without exporting and rebuilding them in a spreadsheet. Reconciling covers matching deposits, fees, refunds and chargebacks back to the transactions that produced them. Designing all three at once is what stops gaps in one becoming manual work in another.

Days, not quarters. A new report, an extra payment path, one more field your accounting system needs — you ask, and we turn it around. There is no roadmap committee between your request and the person who builds it, which is the main practical difference between working with us and working with a large processor.

Yes, and it is some of the work we enjoy most. That means invoicing with terms, purchase order and invoice numbers carried on the transaction itself, ACH sitting alongside cards, and Level 2 and Level 3 data submitted so interchange on commercial cards comes down. The goal is that a payment posts back against the right invoice rather than arriving in your bank as an unexplained deposit.

Yes. Reconciliation is designed in from the start rather than bolted on afterwards, because the reference data that makes month-end straightforward has to be attached at the moment of sale. We work out what your bookkeeper or accounting system needs to receive, then make sure the system produces it in that shape.

No. Many credit card processing companies will try to hide fees from their customers, hoping they will not notice their processing rates skyrocket. Blue Sage works the other way around: no hidden fees, guaranteed rates and optimized pricing, laid out plainly before you sign anything.

No. Blue Sage does not use term contracts. We would rather earn your business every month than hold you to a multi-year agreement.

Dual Pricing lets you display a Card Price and a Discounted Cash Price on the same item. It is not a surcharge — it is a discount given to customers who pay cash. The result is that profit-reducing credit card processing fees come off your bottom line.

Your Concierge is a direct, named point of contact for your account. Whether you have a question about a statement or need a solution for accepting cards at an upcoming event, they are there to give you the support you need — and they will know you by name rather than by account number.

Yes. We make sure your business is compliant from day one and our team reaches out each year to help with your PCI renewal and answer any questions. We would rather be proactive than reactive.

Yes. Our credit card terminals are EMV and NFC compliant, which covers contactless cards along with Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

No. A cookie-cutter program is the easy thing for a processor to sell and rarely the right thing for the merchant. We sit down with you first, look at how your business actually operates — ticket sizes, volume patterns, how your customers prefer to pay, what your current processor is charging you — and design the payment flows, rates, equipment and reporting around that. You explain what you need and we make it happen. The program should benefit your company, not your processor's bottom line.

We think about it less by industry than by how money reaches you: e-commerce, in-store, complex B2B, and high-pace B2C. Most of our customers are more than one of those at once. By industry that has meant retail, restaurants, educational institutions, petroleum and convenience stores, and any business that needs mobile or wireless acceptance — but the program always gets designed around your operation rather than your category.

Schedule an initial strategy call. It is a working session rather than a sales call: we walk through how money reaches your business today, where it gets stuck, and what your team is still doing by hand, then design a system from there. The first call usually only takes a few minutes.