Converting a database of recurring billing customers to CenPOS is easy with the file upload feature. Upload all your customer, agreement terms, and credit card data at once, and the billing will begin automatically per the terms you input.

Below is FAQ for the customer file upload template to be used if you have existing customers and want to upload them all at once into the recurring billing module. This is also a quick way to upload stored card information and automatically create tokens. The alpha numeric ‘token’ that is created is then used to bill customers in the future. All credit card numbers should be securely shredded or digitally trashed after completing this process, as part of your effort to achieve PCI DSS Compliance.

1. If my customer have an existing installment agreement, can I put the original start date and end date, even if it is the past? No.  The start date for the contract must be a future date or it will not bill.
2. My customer has an installment agreement but at the end it automatically renews indefinitely. How do I set that up? For good record keeping, you may prefer to create two agreements. One for the installment, and a second fixed recurring contract with no end date, which would begin at a future date. Alternatively, you could create one recurring agreement with no end date and just add a note of the original contract begin and end date.
3. Should the import file include all header/columns, whether they have data or not? Yes. Any fields not being used just leave blank and put a comma in its place.
4. There is no field in the template for company name. Can the optional fields be used for the upload? Currently the company and department fields are not supported in the data file. We are adding that feature and will support it in the future.
5. Why isn’t there a field for CVV? The CVV is never stored and it does not affect your fees. It’s used as a fraudulent card check and once you’ve verified it, you never need it again. If you want to validate a card, you can perform a card validation, which sends out the card for a zero dollar authorization and validates per the settings you have created on your account.

The recurring billing module supports ACH, debit and credit cards. The file upload supports debit and credit cards. If you have a need to upload ACH, let us know. To get the template,  CONTACT CHRISTINE SPEEDY or your relationship manager.

Image shows the required customer fields in red. The upload file also includes additional fields such as card number, expiration date etc.

After writing the Transfirst review, I stumbled on the news blurb about AAO renewing a three year agreement with Transfirst for credit card processing. The positive news is the deal offers pass through credit card processing. I don’t have any intimate details about how much merchants will pay over interchange though to make any comment. I then further learned that Transfirst has numerous similar deals with other medical associations.

As a parent with kids needing orthodontal care for several years, I’m initimately familiar with the billing requirements of orthodontist practices and the many situations they encounter. Does this sound familiar to you?

• Payments made by almost exclusively by credit card or debit card, rarely cash or check
• Initial downpayment made in person
• Subsequent payments made during office visits
• Some customers on automated payment or would like to be
• Insurance may cover part of obligation
• Multiple parties may be involved in payments (divorced parents, grandparents etc)
• Kids of driving age show up without a parent or payment
• Loans via third party

Convenience Parents would like:

• Ability to pay online. Parents are busy!
• Ability to store payment information and know that it is safe. (The parent not present can pay when it’s convenient.)
  
• Ability to choose whether to accept automated recurring billing. (Puts parent in control of how much convenience they’d like.)
  

A wise man once said, to effectively reach your market, “you need to see what John Smith buys through John Smith’s eyes”.  Once an orthodontist routine is established, for parents, being present to pay a bill or having to call in during normal business hours, is just another pain point, especially when there are other parties involved in making payments. HSA debit cards are becoming more common, so sending a check in the mail is usually not the solution for the parent not there making a payment.

How CenPOS solves these problems:

• Securely store payment information for repeat billing.
• The CenPOS recurring billing module: Set it and forget it payments, including variable amounts and any dates. You can add a patient ‘contract’ and add multiple payers and payment methods for each payer.
• Free secure online paypage for checks, credit, debit cards. Payers can make a one time payment or store their information for later.
• Automatically emails when a card is expiring if a payer has registered.
• EBPP- you could email invoices, though this is less common for orthodontists.

How CenPOS compares to Transfirst:

Payment Gateway Features As Listed on Transfirst June 2012
Differentiating Feature	Transfirst				CenPOS
Automatically prompts users for data to qualify more transactions for lower qualified rates
Signature capture option
Automatically switch transaction indicator to retail or card not present	???
Search records by cardholder name
Create Patient Payment Account and add multiple payers and payment methods
Create any payment amount, any date, any payer method and SCHEDULE it
Store records for 7 years
Free secure online payments page

DISCLAIMER: This review uses publicly available information posted on the competitive product web site as of 6/12/2012. The review does not include the credit card processing, just the gateway product. TransFirst is a registered trademark of TransFirst LLC.

EDITOR SPEEDY COMMENTS:

• Regardless of your business type, CenPOS generally outperforms TransFirst when all the facts are compared.
• API is available to integrate into other software packages.

WHERE TO BUY

CenPOS is sold through direct agents and resellers. There is also a referral program. Click here to become a CenPOS agent, reseller, or referral partner.  Click here to become a customer or call the hotline at the top of this web page.

Tokenization is the process of replacing sensitive data with a meaningless number. There is no universal standard for tokenization in payments. The key principal is that no part of the token has any relation to the credit card or check data.  The tokens themselves are useless outside of the system for which they are designed to be used. Tokens can be created for one time use or stored for recurring.

Encryption is the conversion of data into a form that cannot be easily read by others. That which is encrypted can be decrypted.

Payment card industry data security standards (PCI DSS) do not allow credit card numbers to be stored on a retailer’s point-of-sale (POS) terminal or in its databases after a transaction, with very rare exception.  If you store card data on your servers, regardless of access limitations, you’ll have a hard time proving your company was PCI Compliant in the event of a data breach. The financial liability, and potential criminal liability, is substantial.

If PAN data (primary account/ credit card number ) is encrypted, it’s still within the merchant scope for PCI because it can be decrypted. The exception is if the merchant is using a third party that is using PCI Compliant strong encryption, and there is no ability for the merchant to decrypt the data and get back PAN’s. *

Tokenization helps merchants reduce the scope for PCI DSS compliance whenever credit card data is stored, because the merchant cannot reverse engineer to access the PAN data. Encryption can be used by the third party to protect the data in the token vault. It is not required by PCI.  When a merchant uses a token to process a transaction, the associated payment information in the vault is delivered to the processor. How and in what format? The logical and physical elements vary by provider and specific controls are secret for security reasons, but it’s a fair question to ask when considering a new provider.

The CenPOS payment platform uses both tokenization and encryption for maximum reduction of PCI scope for merchants, and for data security throughout the payment cycle. It provides the most flexibility for merchants, because they can change processors with no disruption to their business.

*Refer to PCI guidelines for further details. Official PCI Security Standards Council Site

Are you worried about fraud or PCI Compliance issues? Looking for ways to decrease your workload? Harnessing the power of CenPOS, a universal payment gateway, stored payment options will save you hours and hours of time, reduce the scope for PCI Compliance, and mitigate risks associated with Card Not Present (CNP) Transactions.

WEBINAR DETAILS:

Are you worried about fraud or PCI Compliance issues? Looking for ways to decrease your workload? Harnessing the power of CenPOS, a universal payment gateway, stored payment options will save you hours and hours of time, reduce the scope for PCI Compliance, and mitigate risks associated with Card Not Present (CNP) Transactions.

WEBINAR DETAILS: 5 Specific Solutions to Recurring Billing Problems (click to reserve your seat)

When: April 17, 11:00 a.m-noon EST.

Who Should Attend: If your company stores credit card or check information for any type of recurring billing, you should attend if you:

• Accept credit card or check payment information via phone or fax
• Key enter transactions
• Set up or modify scheduled payments for customers
• Supervise any of the above
• Reconcile, review or create related financial reports

What You’ll Learn:

1. Four Rebilling Options: Repeat sale, Recurring, Installment, and Variable Installment. Best practices to save time, improve collections and manage your payment charge schedule for any situation!
2. Fraud check: How to validate a customers credit card before securely storing for recurring sales.
3. Authorizaton Forms: How to create customer credit card authorization forms, without storing exposed credit card numbers, that meets newer card association requirements to protect against disputes.
4. Encrypt Payment Data: Two ways to create secure ‘tokens’, unique alpha numeric payment ID’s that drastically reduce keystrokes needed to bill your repeat customer again.
5. Rebilling Customers: How to easily retrieve tokens.

Interact:

• Send questions in advance
• Chat- ask questions during the conference
• Live Q&A
• This is a live demo, not a slideshow.

This graphic table illustrates some of the key differences of CenPOS vs Authorize.net. Using a Catholic High School for items needed, CenPOS crushes the gateway competition and it’s easy to see why schools are flocking to CenPOS.

There’s no question that Authorize.net is a solid product from a reputable company. I’ve actually recommended and used them for over a decade. However, for years they failed to innovate and CenPOS provides better value in every key area, including automated recurring billing. Authorize.net only just entered the multi-payment source market, primarily through acquisition and tying different products together, whereas CenPOS was designed from the ground up to support all payment methods. This is key to why CenPOS is much more flexible to be customized and deliver real-time data that merchants  need to increase efficiencies in operations.

A review of Braintree Payment Solutions and CenPOS universal processing platform for recurring billing follows. While there are several items that both share in common, this review highlights more of the differences. A key difference not outlined in detail is that while both offer a gateway, only one is a switch. A gateway accepts data and passes it through. A switch dynamically makes intelligent decisions based on a number of  through-puts, including merchant defined rules and a host database which is continually updated in real time. The CenPOS switch empowers merchants with more controls over payment processes and the hosted platform provides scalable, flexible technology to change with legislative, merchant, and payment industry changes.

With its promise of portability,  Braintree provides more flexibility than has been available from even the biggest credit card processing providers, for ‘online only’ businesses with a subscription recurring payment requirement.  Since the average small business changes suppliers every 12-18 months, Braintree’s promise of portability provides superior flexibility.

Transferring card data presents significant risk to the merchant in the case of a data breach. To protect from liability, suppliers who hold encrypted card data will generally not release data without a written promise to absolve from any and all liability in the event of any future data breach.

The CenPOS platform excels in markets where greater flexibility is needed in types of payments accepted, where they are accepted, or where interchange optimization is essential such for business to business. Wholesale distributors, law firms, medical billing companies, professional services, IT services, schools and staffing companies will benefit from the broader array of options of CenPOS. For recurring billing, there are very few options for merchants to bill a customer a variable amount with tokenization.  CenPOS provides superior flexibility for mid to large businesses to be PCI Compliant and manage processing costs.
 

In summary, merchants should evaluate all the reasons to choose a service provider for what they have now vs. what they need to leave the service provider later. A free trial or extended out will help users make the right choice.

Click here for more information about CenPOS recurring billing or here for CenPOS.

When a patient has a large medical bill, do you ever agree to multiple payments? How do you handle it? For some operations, the answer is for the customer to call back each month to phone in their payment. The most frequent reason cited is to avoid risks associated with credit card fraud and identity theft.

This scenario is bad for multiple reasons:

1. The patient may not call back.
2. Your staff might have to make more calls to collect later.
3. Staff has to key enter the transaction each and every time a payment is made.
4. Staff has access to credit card data over and over again. (risk)
5. Staff may be writing down card information to keypunch in later, each time creating a period of risk.

All of these can be avoided with a virtual terminal solution that meets all medical billing needs. Your computer can be a virtual terminal simply by logging in to a secure web page. Some think there is more risk with this, however, there is actually less risk.  Unlike desktop terminals, administration controls and manages access remotely on demand. This eliminates risk associated with wrongful use of hardware by cleaning personnel, repair crews and unauthorized employees, plus you can instantly remove, restrict, or expand credit card processing access.

We put the virtual terminal on steroids so you also receive these benefits:

• Save gobs of time! When a customer agrees to multiple payments, enter the customer data one time only and then set the payment schedule. Eliminate the follow up phone calls and other activities. (Recurring Billing)
• Reduce receivables and predict cashflow- Since payment is on ‘autopilot’, collection is more predictable. Dynamic real-time graphic report shows future receivables.
• Instant alerts based on thresholds you set can be transmitted via email to multiple personnel to reduce risk. For example, every refund over $50 sends an email.
• Create a one time payment for a different amount, then future fixed payments. No other virtual terminal allows you to do this! (Token billing)
• If a customer has multiple bills from different dates, enter the card data one time. Then simply add more ‘contracts’ for billing.
• Add multiple cards for a customer and multiple billing addresses- every possible option you need to collect payments are available.
• Least cost routing – eliminate human error and hardware settings from impacting the cost of accepting credit cards.
  
• Improve workflow. Enter payments from immediate work area.
• Optional integration with patient check-ins- customers can make partial payment at hospital on arrival, and agree to rebill same card for balance. You get swipe rate at hospital and phone rate in the future.
• Pay a bill online- create a payment page quickly and easily with just 3 lines of html code to put on an existing web page. Web page creation available for a fee.

FAQ

Can I keep the same credit card processor? Yes. The Virtual Terminal is compatible with all major processors.

Where is the card data stored? It is encrypted and stored on remote PCI Compliant servers with redundant back-up. Once the card data is entered, you’ll never have access to the card information, other than the last 4 digits, again.

How long will it take to learn? The basic tasks are learned in under 15 minutes. Users of advanced features will probably spend a few hours over the course of a week.

Do you provide phone support? Yes, 24/7. There are also dozens of 15-25 second videos for instant answers for every situation so your customers don’t have to wait. Phone support is included in the service.

How much does it cost? A better question is, how much will you save? Reduced credit card processing fees, reduced staff time, and improved cash flow. All agreements are per quote and may include a per transaction fee and or percentage of transaction fee. We custom quote so your business pays a fee relative to your business size, and not a penny more.

What are the computer requirements? Windows XP and above or any Mac OSX, with high speed internet.  There is no software to install. This is a host-based solution.

Can I see a demo? Yes! Call 954-942-0483.  If you want to know what your credit card processing savings will be, please send two consecutive merchant statements for analysis.

Do you offer credit card processing? They are two distinct agreements and we offer both.

How does this work if we also have a billing company handling our lockbox? The set up is very flexible. You can have one account that all users can see data for ie patient payment history and contract set up or not. You’ll have total control as to which users can see what data and what functions they can perform. You’ll never have to wait for a report again because you’ll have real time access to all transactions- on your schedule, and in a format that works for you.

How can we protect against fraud if we don’t ask for the CVV; don’t we save money by getting the CVV? The security or CVV, CVV2, CID code is not required for MAIL/PHONE payments. CVV never impacts cost. There are many other fraud protections such as address verification. Since CVV cannot be stored electronically, we do not collect it for recurring billing or token billing.

What about risks from computers? No data is stored on your computer. To meet PCI Compliance your individual computers or network will need PCI Scanning.

Ever been automatically enrolled in a program that bills your card every month? Legislation is progressing to stop this online tactic.

December 1, 2010 Klobuchar pushes to eliminate underhanded tactics that charge consumers for unwanted services.

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar announced today that the Senate passed a bill protecting online consumers from predatory sales tactics that charge customers for services they were unaware they had purchased. Klobuchar is an original cosponsor of the bill, the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act, which was introduced after a Commerce Committee investigation revealed that some companies aggressively sought to enroll online consumers in costly services without their consent.

“As a former prosecutor, I’ve always believed that our laws must keep pace with advances in technology,” Klobuchar said. “Companies should compete in the free market based on the quality of their products and services – not on how well they can swindle unsuspecting consumers online. This bill boosts e-commerce by rooting out ‘bad actors’ and creating a level playing field online.”

Following introduction of the bill, several companies began to eliminate these practices in response to the efforts of Klobuchar and her Senate colleagues.  The bill would continue to protect future online shoppers by:

• Prohibiting companies from using misleading post-transaction advertisements by requiring them to clearly disclose the terms of the offers to consumers and to obtain consumers’ billing information, including full credit or debit card numbers, directly from the consumers.

• Prohibiting Internet retailers and other commercial websites from transferring a consumer’s billing information, including credit and debit card numbers, to post-transaction third-party sellers.

• Requiring companies that use “negative options” on the Internet to meet certain minimum disclosure and enrollment requirements, so consumers will not end up paying recurring fees for goods and services they did not intend to purchase.

Klobuchar serves on the Commerce Committee, which has authority over most Internet issues. The bill is also sponsored by Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Mark Pryor (D-AK), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and George LeMieux (R-FL).

see prior articles Restore Online Shoppers Confidence Act.