Charging by card at your business: what gets deducted and what you keep
When you charge by card, the processor takes its fee plus VAT on that fee, and the money lands in bundled deposits a few days later. Your real number is the effective rate: what got deposited divided by what you sold.
Yolanda runs a wine shop in Colima. She started accepting card payments, and two weeks in she messaged me convinced she was being robbed: she’d sold $12,400 and the deposits in her account didn’t match up with any of her sales. Not one, not even the sum of a single day’s.
Nobody was robbing her. She was reading the wrong number.
Almost everything written about accepting cards stops at the percentage: is it 3%, is it 4%. That’s the least confusing part, and we’ve already covered it here. What genuinely throws off someone who’s never taken a card payment before is something else: the deposit doesn’t look anything like the sale. That’s what we’re getting into.
What gets deducted when you charge by card?
Two things, not one: the processor’s fee and the VAT on that fee. Nothing else.
The processor’s fee is what the company that moves the money from your customer’s card to your bank account charges. In Mexico it runs around 3% to 4% of the amount plus a few pesos fixed per transaction, depending on your contract and the card type — check yours the day you activate it, because these change.
VAT is the part almost nobody mentions: that fee is a service, and like any service it carries VAT. If they charge you $20 in fees, what actually comes out of your sale is $23.20. It’s not much per sale. It is noticeable by month’s end, and it’s one of the reasons your books never balance on the first try.
Why doesn’t the deposit ever match any single sale?
Because the deposit isn’t a sale: it’s a batch settlement. It’s several sales bundled together, with fees already deducted, arriving a few days later.
That’s exactly where Yolanda got stuck. She was looking in her bank statement for the deposit from Tuesday’s $780 sale. That deposit doesn’t exist. What exists is one on Thursday carrying Tuesday’s sales minus what got deducted, and if there were four sales on Tuesday, it comes as a single figure covering all four.
This has three practical consequences worth understanding before it worries you:
- The date won’t line up. The sale happens on one day, the deposit on another. The first few deposits tend to take longer than the ones after, because the processor is still breaking in your account.
- The amount will never line up. No deposit is ever going to equal any single receipt, ever. Looking for that match is chasing something that doesn’t exist.
- A day with no deposit isn’t a day with no money. If you didn’t take any card sales on Sunday, there’s no Sunday deposit on Tuesday. Sounds obvious, and it startles everyone the first time.
How much do you actually keep? Work out your effective rate
Your real number isn’t the one in your contract, it’s your effective rate: divide what got deposited into your account that month by what you sold by card that month.
With Yolanda’s numbers: she sold $12,400 and was deposited $11,940. That’s 96.3%, meaning 3.7% got lost along the way. That 3.7% is her number — fee, VAT, and everything combined — and it’s the only one worth using to decide anything.
Do this with a full month, not a week, because deposits spill across month boundaries and a stray week will lie to you. And do it once a year, because rates change and nobody tells you.
With that number you can finally answer real questions: if your margin on a bottle is 18% and your effective rate is 3.7%, accepting the card costs you a fifth of your margin on that sale. Is it worth it? Almost always yes, because the alternative isn’t “the same sale in cash” — it’s no sale at all. But now it’s a decision, not a hunch.
What about refunds? That’s where it actually stings
If you refund a sale, the processor doesn’t give you back its fee. You return the full $780 to the customer, and you’ve already paid around $30 to move that money in the first place.
That’s why a refund costs more than the sale you never made, and why it’s worth having your return policy written out on your own site — what qualifies, within how many days, in what condition. Not to argue with the customer: so you’re both looking at the same thing before a problem ever comes up.
It’s the same story with a chargeback, which is when the customer disputes the charge directly with their bank. There, the best defense is deeply boring and it works: the order needs to be on record with a name, a date, what they got, and how much they paid. Charging through your own site leaves you that record automatically; taking a random bank transfer doesn’t.
Does Proyecta take a cut of your sales?
No. Zero percent, today, in every country. Proyecta doesn’t take any commission on what you sell.
I’m spelling this out because it’s the question that comes up most, and because the answer tends to be an uncomfortable one elsewhere. The fee you will pay is the payment processor’s, and that one isn’t ours: it’s charged by whoever moves the money, and it’s paid by anyone who accepts cards, from your wine shop all the way up to the big apps.
What if your customer doesn’t want to pay by card?
Then they don’t pay by card, and the order still goes through. On your site you can leave the option to reserve and pay in cash or by bank transfer when they come pick it up: the order gets recorded, the product is held for 72 hours, and if nobody shows up, it releases itself and goes back on sale.
That last part matters more than it seems. Without that window, reserving something means someone has to remember to un-reserve it, and nobody ever does.
Where do you see what’s coming in?
Your site’s console has a Deposits tab with your balance and the history of everything already deposited. You don’t have to open your bank app or do the math by hand: it’s all there — what’s landed, what’s on its way, and when it went out.
It’s the same place where you edit your products and prices, so it’s not a separate system to learn.
Start by knowing your number
If you already accept card payments, work out last month’s effective rate before making any decision about pricing. It’s two figures and one division, and it’ll probably surprise you in a good way.
And if you don’t accept card payments yet and want to start, describe it the way you’d say it out loud — “a site for my wine shop with a catalog, card payment, and the option to reserve and pay in cash” — and publish it at proyecta.dev. The rest is just reading your deposits right.