Tip adjustment after authorization
A ticket is authorized at one amount and settled at another. If your system handles that badly you get downgrades, and downgrades cost real money at volume.
Restaurants
Credit card processing for restaurants.
Tabs stay open, tips get adjusted after the card is run, and the margin on a plate does not leave much room for a fee you did not expect. Here is what to look at.
No obligation. I follow up personally.
What matters in a restaurant
Where restaurant fees quietly go up.
Margins are thin enough that the monthly line items matter as much as the rate.
Turning tables
Pay at the table, split checks, and fast approval times matter more to a floor than a tenth of a percent on the rate does.
Third-party orders
Delivery platforms and online ordering have to reach your POS without a second screen and a staff member retyping tickets.
Restaurants have one cost pattern that most other businesses do not: the amount that gets authorized is almost never the amount that gets settled. A tip added on paper after the card has run means the transaction is adjusted before batch. Handled correctly this is routine. Handled badly, those transactions fall into a more expensive interchange category, and on a few hundred tickets a week the difference is not small.
The second pattern is batch timing. Settling late pushes transactions into a higher cost category. A system that batches automatically at close removes the problem entirely, and it is worth confirming that yours does.
The third is hardware sprawl. A terminal at the bar, a handheld for the patio, a tablet for online orders, and a legacy machine nobody uses that still carries a monthly lease payment. Leases are typically non-cancelable and routinely cost several times what the equipment is worth. If you have one, find the end date before you consider changing anything else.
None of that requires switching providers to fix. Some of it is configuration. The fee check tells you which is which, and if the honest answer is that your current setup is priced fairly, you get that answer.
Running a restaurant in Austin
Austin restaurants live with bigger swings in volume than most. A festival weekend, a home game, or a big convention downtown can put a remarkable number of tickets through the terminal in a few days, and then things go quiet again. Two things follow. A monthly minimum that looks harmless in a busy month bites in a slow one. And batch timing matters most on exactly the nights when service runs late.
Austin also brings a lot of visitors. Cards issued outside the United States carry extra cross-border charges, and travel rewards cards carry higher interchange. Neither is a reason to turn anyone away, but both push your effective rate up in ways that have nothing to do with your provider's markup. That is exactly why the markup is the part worth checking.
If your kitchen runs in Spanish and your front of house runs in English, the conversation about your fees can happen in either.
Free fee check
Look at the floor before you look at the rate.
Find the total fees on last month's processing statement and enter it here. Luis will look at it personally and tell you, within 24 to 48 hours, whether it is fair.
- No statement upload. Two numbers are enough to start.
- A personal answer from Luis within 24 to 48 hours.
- If what you pay today is already fair, he will tell you that.
Before you compare quotes, gather these
The comparison is only honest if both sides are measured the same way.
- Last month's total fees and total card sales
- Your average ticket and a sense of your busiest and slowest months
- How many tickets are tipped and adjusted after authorization
- Every platform your POS has to connect to
- Whether any terminal on the floor is leased rather than owned
Related reading
Common questions
Questions from owners like you.
Do I need a restaurant-specific POS?
It depends on your service style. Counter service can run on a general system, but full service with open tabs, coursing, and split checks tends to need software built for it. The payment processing and the POS software are separate decisions and can be evaluated separately.
How are tips handled at the fee level?
The transaction is authorized for the ticket amount and settled for the ticket plus tip. Your system needs to submit that adjustment correctly before batch, or the transaction can be downgraded to a more expensive category.
Can I offer a cash price and a card price?
Dual pricing programs are used widely in food service, but they have to be structured correctly, with the card price posted as the base price and cash shown as the discount. Structured the other way around it is treated as surcharging, which carries different rules.
Will delivery platform orders run through my processing?
Third-party delivery has its own commission structure that is separate from your card processing. What matters for your setup is whether those orders reach your POS automatically rather than through a separate tablet.
Talk to Luis
Talk through how your service runs.
Call or text Luis. A few minutes on how your floor works tells him most of what matters.