The Green Sheet Online Edition
May 5, 2009 • 09:05:02
Outsourced residual computing
For ISOs with hundreds or even thousands of merchants in their portfolios, parsing the different residuals of each merchant level salesperson (MLS) from a bed of aggregated data can be a time-consuming headache. A new service called the EZPay ISO Portal, from ePayware Inc., allows ISOs to outsource that job to a more efficient, computerized calculator.
"What we've heard from ISOs is it's not rocket science taking this Excel sheet and splitting it apart and sending it out, but the time it takes and the errors that can get generated by human intervention doing that obviously starts to create some problems," said Ray Somani, President of ePayware.
"You have to remember all the different calculations from month to month, and remember again that agent one gets a 70 percent split and agent two gets a 50 percent split - those types of things, " he added.
Simple addition
While ISOs commonly get bogged down in accounting, those subscribed to EZPay need only to register their MLSs - along with their different residual rates - through an online platform. Every month thereafter, when the electronic file of uncrunched merchant data arrives from its processor, the ISO simply routes that packet to EZPay for parsing. Somani said EZPay calulates an entire company's residuals in as little as half an hour, "where it normally would take a week."
"You go in and enter all of your sales reps and basically enter all of the splits or how you pay each of the reps," Somani said. "So every month when they get their residual file they can just take that file and upload it through the Web into our secure system and it parses and does all the calculations out, and all their agents can log in and see their splits."
Restricted access
Each agent has an individual account that's typically unviewable by others, although Somani said access to an account can be tailored to a company's "hierarchy tree" - allowing agents to view the accounts of their subagents, for example, and executives to see the entire database.
"The ISO could set up the different agents, and if the agents have subagents, you could do that as well, so we go down as many levels as you want," Somani said. "And the purpose of those levels: one is to determine payment but, secondly, also to do a restriction where, depending on where you lie, you can only see that portion of your information.
"From an ISO perspective you sit on the top, so you can clearly see your whole portfolio. So, in addition, this residual system acts almost like a profitability or portfolio analysis tool for the ISO as well, because he can drill down and look at his portfolio as a whole. He can drill down into his agent offices or drill down by type of merchant and see what his profitibility looks like that way as well."
According to Somani, ISOs currently subscribed to EZPay have between five and 50 MLSs, and add from 50 to 200 merchants a month. "As far as the advantages of this solution, obviously the parsing is part of it, but also the ability to present it on the Web and make it readily available in a way that's instantaneous," Somani said.
ePayware Inc.
408-417-0123
www.epayware.net
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