Surcharge vs fees on a card payment
Surcharge is the amount added to your client's bill to help cover card costs, so it increases what you collect. Fees are what the payment processor keeps out of that money, so they reduce it. Net received is what actually reaches your bank, and it is the number to trust.
Open any card payment and you will see two amounts that sound like the same thing. They are opposites, and knowing which is which is the difference between thinking you earned $500 and knowing you earned $501.68.
The two amounts
Surcharge is money coming toward you. If you have chosen to pass card costs to your clients, WorkZen adds this to the invoice as a Processing fee line item, so your client pays a little more than the invoice total. It shows in green with a plus sign.
Fees is money leaving. It is what the payment processor keeps out of the transaction, and it comes straight from the processor's own record rather than being estimated. It shows with a minus sign.
Net received is the result: what actually lands in your bank account. When you want to know what a job really earned, this is the line.
A real example
A $500 invoice, with a 3.5% surcharge passed to the client:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Invoice total | $500.00 |
| Surcharge added to the client's bill | $17.51 |
| Total Charged to their card | $517.51 |
| Fees kept by the processor | $15.83 |
| Net received | $501.68 |
You invoiced $500 and kept $501.68. The surcharge slightly over-covered the cost, so you came out a fraction ahead.
Why the surcharge does not always cover the cost
The surcharge is a straight percentage of the invoice. Processors charge a percentage and a small fixed amount on every transaction, and WorkZen deliberately never bills that fixed part to your client.
On a large invoice the percentage swallows the fixed part easily. On a small one it cannot:
| Invoice | Net received | Difference |
|---|---|---|
| $20.00 | $19.78 | 22 cents short |
| $125.00 | $125.20 | 20 cents ahead |
| $500.00 | $501.68 | $1.68 ahead |
| $2,500.00 | $2,509.57 | $9.57 ahead |
If most of your work is small tickets, this is worth knowing. It is a matter of cents per job, but it is real, and before now there was no way to see it.
The totals at the top of the Payments page
Four figures summarise every completed payment:
- Collected is everything your clients were charged, surcharges included.
- Surcharges is how much of that was the added card cost.
- Fees paid is what processors kept.
- Net received is what reached you.
Payments whose fee is unknown are left out of these totals and counted separately underneath, so the numbers you see are always ones we can stand behind.
When fees show as "Not recorded"
Two situations produce a blank fee.
Payments taken before WorkZen began storing settlement figures do not have one yet. And payments you entered by hand for a card you ran somewhere else went through a processor we never saw, so we have no way to know its cut.
In both cases the fee is unknown, not zero. WorkZen will not fill in a zero, because a zero would claim you kept every cent and quietly inflate your income. Blank is the honest answer.
Cash, checks, e-transfers, bank transfers, and Zelle are different: there is genuinely no processor, so those show a zero fee and a Net received equal to the full amount.
Changing your surcharge
The surcharge is yours to set. Go to Settings, open Integrations, then Stripe, and use Pass processing fees to clients. You can turn it off entirely, in which case you absorb the card cost and your net will sit below the invoice total, or adjust the percentage up to the maximum allowed for your country.
Whichever you choose, Net received tells you how it is actually working out.
Frequently Asked Questions
This article answers:
- What is the difference between the surcharge and the fees on a payment?
- How much do I actually receive after a credit card payment?
- Why is my net lower than the invoice total?
- Does passing the processing fee to my client cover it completely?
- What does 'Not recorded' mean on a payment's fees?