Processors bill their fees in one of two ways. Most bill once a month: your daily deposits arrive gross, and a single fee withdrawal hits your bank at month end (monthly discount). Others take their fee out of every day's deposit, so what lands in the bank each day is the batch total minus that day's fee (daily discount).
Before Automatic Batch Reconciliation (ABR), daily discount merchants had to compute and book a fee journal entry for every single batch by hand. With ABR's Daily Discount option, the batch journal entry itself splits the gross into net-to-bank plus fee, so your books balance every day and the month closes clean.
Choosing your fee method
On the ABR screen, the credit card module has a Monthly Discount / Daily Discount selector. Choose the option that matches how your processor actually takes its fee; if you are not sure, ask your processor or the partner who set up your merchant account.
- Monthly Discount: deposits arrive gross. ABR does not post a fee entry; you book the processor's month-end withdrawal as an ordinary fee expense, as you always have.
- Daily Discount: deposits arrive net of the day's fee. ABR books the fee for you, batch by batch. Switching to Daily Discount requires a Merchant Fees expense account mapping (see Setting Up ABR).
The selector applies to credit card only. ACH and check batches carry no per-batch fee, so they always use the monthly model.
Confirming the fee on each batch
On some gateways, Biller Genie pulls the day's fee directly from the processor during batch ingestion. Those batches go straight to Pending Sync with the fee and net already filled in, with no manual step. If the automatic fee lookup ever fails, the batch simply falls back to the manual flow below.
On all other gateways, each new batch arrives as Pending Fee Entry (orange pill), with a banner asking you to enter the daily discount fee amounts in the batch grid. Enter the day's fee, and the Net amount computes as gross minus fee. Click Confirm, and the journal entry posts on the next sync.
Until the fees you enter are applied, the batch grid shows a warning so unconfirmed fees are hard to miss. If several batches are waiting, the Confirm All Fees action confirms them all in one step.
Entering fees for several batches at once, with the Confirm All Fees action
Confirm All Fees asks for confirmation before closing out the batches with the entered amounts
After confirming, the batches move to Pending Sync
Monthly discounting shows only the Gross amount, with no fee entry required
What the journal entries look like
With Monthly Discount, each settled batch posts a two-line journal entry:
| Account | Debit / Credit | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement Sweep Account | Credit | Batch gross |
| Settlement Account (bank) | Debit | Batch gross |
With Daily Discount, the entry has three lines:
| Account | Debit / Credit | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Settlement Sweep Account | Credit | Batch gross |
| Settlement Account (bank) | Debit | Batch net (gross minus fee) |
| Merchant Fees Account | Debit | Fee |
Two edge cases worth knowing:
- A daily discount batch with a zero fee collapses to the two-line shape; no zero-dollar fee line is posted.
- On a refund-heavy day, the batch total can be negative. Every line's debit and credit simply flip, money moves from the bank back into the sweep, and the sweep still returns to zero.
If your deposits are short but you are on Monthly Discount
If your bank deposits keep coming in smaller than your batch journal entries say, your processor is probably netting its fee from each day's deposit. The fix is to switch the credit card module to Daily Discount; that is the native solution, and it stops the difference from accumulating.