Payment Processing for Professional Services

A practice usually has three payment moments, and a client who cannot use their preferred one delays the invoice:

• In person, at the end of a visit: a terminal on the desk accepts tap, chip and swipe in seconds, which keeps the front desk from handling cash and cheques.
• By phone: many clients settle an invoice while calling about something else, which needs a way to accept a card number without asking them to visit.
• Online: clients who prefer to pay at their own convenience need a card option on the practice website rather than a phone call during office hours.
• Interac debit: Canadian clients, particularly in Quebec, expect to be able to pay with the bank card they carry.
• A receipt on the spot: clients want documentation of a professional payment immediately, not at the end of the month.

The set of solutions that answers all five is smaller than it sounds: one terminal, one virtual terminal and one merchant account.

For a practice that bills for time rather than selling products, the virtual terminal is usually the workhorse:

• It lets you key in a card payment from any computer or phone, with no terminal and no hardware to install.
• It suits invoices settled by phone, deposits taken when an appointment is booked, and payments arranged outside office hours.
• Keyed-in payments generally cost more to accept than tap payments, so it is worth knowing what share of your volume runs through the phone.
• Because it is part of the same account as the desk terminal, every payment, whatever its channel, lands in one transaction report.

A practice that mostly bills remotely can start with the virtual terminal alone and add a PAX terminal when a card-present option becomes worth having. Both run on the same account.

Professional practices hold client information that makes an extra compliance burden unwelcome. Payment security is one area where the work sits with the processing environment rather than with you:

• PAX terminals are PCI-DSS certified and EMV compliant, so card data is handled inside a certified device rather than captured by your staff.
• Working with a processor that handles compliance reduces what the practice must manage itself, compared with trying to handle PCI obligations in isolation.
• Interac, contactless and mobile wallet payments all run through the same certified path, so accepting more payment types does not add a second compliance question.
• The terminals run on the Android-based MAXSTORE platform, with device management handled through the platform rather than by a technician visiting the office.

The practical result is that the practice can state plainly how client payments are handled, without maintaining its own card-data systems.

In a practice, the cost of a messy payment trail shows up as bookkeeping hours. The account is built to make the trail clean:

• Transaction history is available for accounting and tax reporting, so a month can be reconstructed without matching paper receipts.
• Deposits and fees appear on clear statements that can be reconciled against the practice’s own records.
• Payment volumes can be tracked by card type and payment method, which separates card fees from anything else in the ledger.
• Dispute and chargeback activity is visible in one place, so a contested payment is handled as a task rather than a surprise.

For a practice with a part-time bookkeeper or an external accountant, that reporting is often worth more than a fraction of a percentage point in rate.

A practice that serves clients in both languages should not have to switch to English to fix a payment problem:

• Support is available in English and French from a team based in Quebec.
• Interac debit is accepted alongside credit cards, contactless tap and mobile wallets including Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• Pricing is interchange-plus, so the card network cost and the provider markup appear separately on the statement.
• There is no long-term contract: if the numbers stop working for the practice, there is nothing to buy out.