Ok here’s the scoop staff – your lives have just gotten more complicated. The new credit card machine has a mind of it’s own and it’s full of questions for you – it’s sort of like a choose your own adventure book where the choices you make will determine the rate at which the Healing Arts Center will be charged for the transaction. You see credit card companies charge different rates for how risky a transaction is, it works just like insurance, high risk drivers pay more. So our new company is all about low risk and low rates – which is good for the center!!!! That said, here’s what’s new and what’s coming next week.

Next week we will have a debit card punch pad on a cord, our rep brought one today but it was faulty, so until Monday we will ring all debit card transactions through as credit cards, just as we have been. Except that we used to begin a credit card transaction by swiping the card, entering the last four digits, the amount, and if a phone order than the zip code; now we begin by pressing the number 1. The machine will then ask you if the sale is credit or debit and you respond by pushing one or zero – before you start to panic, there are step by step instructions left by the credit card people in a tri-fold brochure that we will keep at the front desk until we all learn this new system. Also, this smart little machine will tell you what to do next – “please swipe card now”.

Debit card transactions that use the key pad are lower risk, that’s part of why we’re doing this. High risk transactions are things like phone orders, new laws have been passed to help reduce fraud and to lower risk. In addition to the zip code, you will now also need to get from phone orders the last three numbers of the authorization code on the white strip on the back of a credit card, and (this one surprised me) the house number of the address to which the bill is sent. So if I were doing a phone order from the center to someone in Cleveland who was using our credit card machine I would need to give them the card number, the expiration date, the last three numbers on the right of the white strip on the back of the card, our zip code & 2601 (our street number). WOW!!!! That’s a lot of info. Another new safety feature is that the card number no longer shows up on the receipt which means there is no longer any point in making photocopies of credit card receipts for workshops – so we can stop that task.

I will of course go over this in person several times with all of you, but this info is a good place to start –k-

Reducing risk is what we are sometimes all about, I would like to remind you to please make sure all checks have phone numbers on them so that should they bounce we can call them and ask why.