Introducing Cost Health: Automatic Monitoring for Payment Processing Fee Spikes

Take a minute to think about how many fee line items make up your payment processing costs. 

Who are we kidding? We don’t need to remind you about the sheer number of fees you face; you probably think about them all the time! Interchange, processing fees, and penalties are just a portion of what plagues you. And, of course, every fee is a little different for each processor you work with, and every fee-processor combination fluctuates independently. Checking all of these combinations on a recurring basis can feel like a waste of time, but not doing it puts you at risk of unpleasant surprises.

That's why we built Cost Health, an automated cost monitoring and alerting system built directly into our payments intelligence platform.

Know When Something Changes, Without Even Looking

On the 20th of every month, Cost Health automatically reviews your payment processing fees from the previous month, broken down by fee subcategory for each processor. If any fee increases enough to warrant a review, you’ll receive an alert. 

The homepage of your Pagos Service Panel now doubles as a cost cockpit, surfacing these alerts so you’ll never miss an important update. The moment you log in, you'll know if any fee changed significantly in the last month. Click the alert to pop over to your Fees by Subcategory dashboard to continue your analysis.

For cases where you want to go even deeper, we've also added the option to open fee data in Charts directly from the Fees Dashboard. There, you can build out custom data visualizations, breaking down the fee in question by whatever dimension might explain the change, whether that's MID, payment method, card brand, or something else.

Smart Detection That Cuts Out the Noise

A fee increase alone doesn’t always mean you have a problem. Honestly, that simple fact is part of what makes cost monitoring genuinely difficult. If you processed more volume last month, you can bet that your interchange went up too. Similarly, if you shifted volume to a new processor, that processor's fees will be higher than before. Neither of those is something to worry about.

Cost Health takes your processing volume into account, so it can tell the difference between a concerning fee increase and one that simply reflects your business’s growth. We’ll only alert you when a fee subcategory increases both beyond what’s expected given the previous three months of cost data and relative to your total processing volume. Every notification means something changed that can't be explained by volume alone, and you need to pay attention.

Quick Example

Suppose it's December 20th, and Pagos has ingested and collated all your fee reports from November. Cost Health spots a spike in penalty fees on one of your processors, even though your overall approved volume was actually down that month.

Penalty fees overall are small relative to interchange, so this kind of movement is easy to miss in a manual review. But once penalties have your full attention and you start to review them in isolation, you spot the issue immediately: a spike in the integrity penalty on final authorization. This penalty is triggered by not properly settling transactions in a timely manner, so you can quickly adjust your internal operations to ensure you don’t face another month of elevated penalties.

When cost changes are real and meaningful, but too easy to miss, Cost Health has your back.

Getting Started

Cost Health is available on the homepage of your Pagos Service Panel, no setup needed. Log in to see what our automated fee monitor finds. 

Have questions about what you're seeing? Reach out to your account manager or contact our team. Not working with Pagos yet? Set up a demo today.