We’ve just updated a few things in the way Quail calculates and applies card fees, which might need you to have a look at your store settings and make sure your customer card fee is set correctly! If you don’t charge a card fee (or a credit card ‘surcharge’) then you can just stop reading here; this is entirely a card-fee focused update.

First up: we added a new option to ignore the card fee when ringing up individual sales. Those of you in states where you’re no longer allowed to charge a card fee on debit card payments but can still charge it on credit cards, this one’s for you. We’re still holding out hope that Square will give us a way to detect & differentiate between credit & debit cards, but right now (as of February 2024) that doesn’t seem to be an option – so until then you’ll need to manually skip the card fee when a customer says “hey, I’m paying with a debit card.”

Second, we’ve changed the way we calculate card fees to a simpler method. Previously Quail asked you to provide us with the % card fee charged by your card processor (e.g. 2.6% for Square) and Quail would calculate a customer-facing card fee that would cover that fee % from your processor. Importantly – and confusingly! – that amount would always be slightly more than the raw percentage applied to the payment, since you also pay a card processing fee on the card fee payment. The math on this is annoying, but surprising, and a lot of folks were confused by this.

Which makes sense! For the overwhelming majority of stores that is…not what you’d expect, so we’ve switched to simply adding on the flat percentage. This is probably what you want to be doing anyway, particularly if you’re in a state (👋🏻 Maryland) where new 2024 rules require card fees to work this way.