Tax Prep and Accounting Merchant Account

When you’re in the accounting and tax preparation business, you want to be able to help as many people as possible. Whether that's during the busy tax season or year round, your services will require an accounting tax prep merchant account to accept credit cards.

But, finding a credit card processing provider may be more difficult than anticipated. Traditional banks are likely going to turn your application down because this industry is considered high risk or hard-to-place by acquiring banks.

Accounting Merchant Accounts are Hard to Place

Tax preparation and other businesses in the financial industry are tagged as high risk due to the following reasons:

Strike One: Accepting Mail Order/ Telephone Order (MoTo) Payments This transaction type is very common in this profession, but tends to be less secure than in-person swipe and online gateways, MoTo payments have fewer failsafes to counteract fraud. Overall, acquiring banks prefer to support brick-and-mortar establishments and businesses with physical products making it harder, but not impossible, for tax preparation services to find payment processing support.

Strike Two: High Average Ticket Sizes CPAs and Tax preparation businesses are lucrative services that commonly have high ticket sizes of hundreds of dollars or more. This in addition to the inconsistent income when processing during vs. after tax season leads banks to keeping these business types at arms length.

Strike Three: Accounting is a Service Businesses such as these don’t usually deal with physical products, and services in the financial industry, especially student loan consolidation or debt counseling, commonly have clientele with debt issues or bad credit. What comes along with that is higher rates of chargebacks and fraud.

As you can see it isn’t anything personal, many banks have strict policies deterring them from supporting businesses with these risks. Luckily, high risk payment processors are able to measure these individual risks and find tactics to mitigate them. This way you can set up your account with credit card processing solutions which allow you to grow your business.

Partnering with a Credit Card Processor you can Trust

At PaymentCloud, we strive to provide secure, PCI compliant, and simple solutions to begin processing all types of credit cards including Visa, MasterCard, and Discover. Capture more business with our integrated online gateway and in-store terminal options. Then get set up with our fraud and chargeback mitigation suite to ensure that every transaction is processed and tracked from input to deposit.

Integrate With your Accounting Software

Platforms such as QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Zoho Books are great resources for your accounting business, but they're only as smart as the integrations you can plug into it. Finding a merchant account can open up a multitude of possibilities to make your accounting tax prep business more seamless. This may include automatic invoicing, payment reminders, digital recording, and even inventory management. Payment processors such as PaymentCloud value these softwares and want to be sure that you can take advantage of them, so we have made it a mission to ensure integrations with each of these resources.

Still unsure? No Worries, You Have our Support

Even if you don’t have the best personal credit or are beginning a completely new accounting business, we have the bandwidth and track record to get your company up and running.

We house over 30 senior account representatives available each day to help answer questions and provide valuable support because we want to see you succeed. And once you begin the task of securing a merchant account to process credit cards, you will be assigned a dedicated rep who specializes in your business type’s wants and needs.