- Your true effective rate, decomposed line by line.
- Junk fees: PCI non-compliance, statement, batch, gateway, "regulatory" program fees, monthly minimums.
- Equipment leases that outlive their usefulness.
- Tier downgrades quietly inflating your rate — and the operational fixes.
- Flat-rate vs. interchange-plus: what your volume actually deserves.
- Rate creep since the deal you originally negotiated.
Margin Recovery Check
Your statements and invoices may be hiding correctable costs.
Card swipe fees are now the convenience industry's second-highest operating cost — ahead of rent and utilities — and for many stores they exceed pre-tax profits, per NACS. Industry research on direct-store-delivery billing found errors on roughly one in five DSD invoices. Big chains have entire departments recovering this money. Your store has whoever's behind the counter.
Bring one card-processing statement and one week of vendor invoices — papers already in your drawer. No logins, no system access, no customer data.
How it works
Share selected documents securely. See the source behind every finding.
- Book the first look.We confirm the fit before any sensitive document is shared.
- Use the restricted upload.After you receive the engagement terms, independence pledge, and data-handling notice, share one monthly card-processing statement and a sample of delivery invoices through the approved upload path.
- See the source.Junk fees, rate changes, invoice errors, and missing credits are tied back to the exact statement or invoice line. Uncertain reads are flagged for human review.
- Choose the recovery path.Renegotiate in place, compare alternatives, or file the vendor credit. Any pricing-model change remains subject to current law and card-network rules.
- Invoice math errors — they're more common than anyone believes.
- Duplicate billing across invoices.
- Price creep on your own items, tracked against your own history.
- Promised promo allowances that never landed.
- Shorted deliveries — and the count-before-you-sign discipline that ends them.
- Credit memos promised verbally that never appeared on paper.
Why trust us with your statements
We take zero money from payment processors. In writing.
Most "free statement audits" are resellers hunting a switching commission — their advice points wherever their commission lives. MarginHero accepts no residuals, no referral bounties, no processor revenue of any kind, and every engagement includes our signed independence pledge. We're paid by you, on what you keep — which is why "stay with your processor and make them price you fairly" is an answer we can actually give.
Built by a retail asset-protection leader with 20 years of chain-store experience — the same discipline big retail uses to protect its margin, sized for independent stores.
Keep it fixed
Margin Guard: the ongoing watch.
Processors change pricing; vendor costs drift. Margin Guard re-reads the processor statements and invoice volume included in your plan, compares them with your own history, and tracks included credits until they land. Plans run from $99 to $249 per location each month, with document and call limits written into the scope. Cancel anytime, and your retained price history exports to you on the way out.
Important note
Recovery, not accusation.
Vendor findings are billing discrepancies to reconcile, handled professionally and cordially — busy routes and billing systems produce honest errors, and our credit requests treat them that way. The Margin Recovery Check reviews documents you choose to share; it is not legal, accounting, tax, or insurance advice, and results vary with each store's documents and circumstances. Sources: NACS swipe-fee research and Tactiq's vendor-reported DSD invoice analysis.