Every fee on your retail statement, named, usually within 4 hours

1. CPS/Retail vs keyed entry

In Visa's April 18, 2026 US interchange schedule, a card tapped or dipped at the till and correctly submitted qualifies for CPS/Retail, Debit at 0.80% + $0.15. Type that same card number in by hand at the counter and it falls to CPS/Retail Key Entry, Debit at 1.65% + $0.15 — more than double the percentage, plus it opens a fraud dispute right (Visa's dispute condition 10.3, a 120-day window) that a chip transaction does not carry. These are interchange reimbursement fees paid between banks, not your bill directly — your merchant discount sits on top — but the spread between a tapped sale and a keyed one is the single biggest controllable number on a retail statement, and it shows up only when someone checks how each sale was actually submitted, not just the summary total.

2. Debit routing

A large share of retail volume is debit, and debit interchange is capped by law for larger issuers: 12 CFR 235.3(b) sets the ceiling at 21 cents plus 5 basis points of the transaction value, with up to 1 more cent under 235.4 for issuers meeting fraud-prevention standards — which is why Visa's schedule shows a separate "regulated" column at 0.05% + $0.21. Section 235.7(a) requires every debit card to carry at least two unaffiliated networks, and 235.7(b) prohibits an issuer or network from stopping a merchant from routing a debit transaction over whichever of those networks can process it. Whether your terminals are actually configured to take advantage of that choice is a question we put to your current provider in writing as part of the read, not something we assume from the statement alone.

3. Returns, chargebacks and the fine print on refunds

Visa's rules require a merchant that restricts returns, refunds or cancellations to disclose that policy before the cardholder completes the sale — at the point of transaction, on the front of the receipt with a space to indicate acceptance, or behind a click-to-accept online — and a merchant may not require a cardholder to waive the right to dispute a transaction. A US issuer must post a credit within 3 business days of settlement for credit cards and within 1 business day for Visa Check Cards, barring exceptional circumstances. On the fraud side, retailers often assume an in-store sale cannot be charged back: the EMV liability shift protects a merchant only when the sale ran through an EMV-compliant chip-reading device with full chip data, and a keyed card-present sale still carries that 120-day dispute right under condition 10.3. We check whether your return policy is disclosed the way the rules require and whether keyed volume is creating chargeback exposure you are not pricing for.

4. Whether "qualified" means what you think it means

Visa publishes credit performance threshold criteria for national retail chains — Retail Threshold I alone requires 133.4 million transactions and $8.83 billion in annual volume — numbers no independent store reaches. So when a provider's own pricing schedule uses the word "qualified," it is describing that provider's private tier definition, not a Visa threshold program, and the gap between the two is exactly where a non-qualified surcharge is often buried. We ask for that definition in writing and check it against what actually cleared.