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ACH & Convenience Fees in ISN

Guardian offers integrated ACH payments for ISN users, streamlining your e-check payments and potentially eliminating your credit card processing fees. If you have been thinking about charging a convenience fee to your customers when they use a credit card but have been hesitant to introduce potential contention to the process, you can now offer ACH as a free alternative to your customers. With ISN’s new integrated e-check solution, your customers will be presented with the option to pay for the inspection with a credit card for an additional fee (completely controlled by you) or to pay with an e-check for free.

You can start the onboarding process here.

ACH / Convenience Fee Tutorial

ACH FAQ

 It takes 3-5 days for funds to reach your account.

The funding is separate from the credit card transactions. Both ACH and credit card account transactions show in the same report area but are listed completely separate. Inspectors can tell the transactions apart because the ACH transactions are labeled E-Check vs Visa or MC or AMEX, etc.

 No. ACH transactions (often referred to as electronic checks) run just like a paper check. They still have to go through a FDIC clearing house and can still bounce. We are able to verify up front that the account information is correct but not if there are funds available. So the transaction can still “bounce”.

Similar to when you deposit a physical check, the bank will accept the check and deposit the money in your account, but you don’t find out if it bounces for a week or so. ACH works the same. It’s important for you to check your CardPointe dashboard regularly to find out if any past transactions were “returned” (this is the term it uses for rejected transactions).
To do this, simply follow these steps:
1. Login to your CardPointe dashboard, then click on the “Reporting” tab (if you have never logged into your CardPointe dashboard, see instructions below).
2. Click on the “Date” drop down and do a search for a specific date range (if you haven’t done this yet, you will want to go back to when you started accepting ACH. In the future, you can just use the default view of the “last 7 days”)
3. Click on the “Method” drop down and check the box for “ACH Return”. The transactions that show up in this report are ones that showed up as “paid” in ISN but later were rejected (bounced). In these situations, you will want to reach out to the customer and collect another form of payment.

Yes. ISN is releasing the report to the customer in that status. The status will change to “paid” once the transaction has fully cleared.

The ACH account is $20 per month and $2.25 per transaction. If more than one inspection per month is paid with ACH you will typically break even.

Yes, if you are using ISN’s convenience fee tool, then you can choose to increase your inspection fee by a percentage or a fixed amount (you control the amount) which will cover your monthly processing fees. However, Guardian also has a surcharging account where Guardian charges the surcharge and splits that portion off of your batch, so you get the full inspection fee. Guardian gets the surcharge amount, eliminating the processing fee. Your monthly credit card fees would be $0.00

ISN is dialing into a system that verifies the account number and that the routing numbers are valid. With ACH, funds will not be verified for 3-5 business days. If that ACH transaction is returned for “insufficient funds”, ISN will notify you so that you can collect payment another way. Other third-party systems require you to log in to their dashboard every day to look for declined transactions, otherwise, you would not be aware if the transaction was declined. Only with ISN’s integrated ACH will you get the security of knowing you will be notified if a transaction is declined at a later date.

ISN is currently the only inspection software that has access to Guardian’s preferred gateway and has an integrated ACH processing account.