❗ Prorata does not apply on service fees.

Shipping fees and other fees are also excluded from the Service fee calculation.

Keep reading if you are curious to learn about what a service fee is, what’s the benefit of charging a service fee, and what are the improvements we’ve made to the Service Fee feature in SmartRec.

What is a service fee?

A service fee is an automatically applied line item that is charged to an invoice based on the rules configured by the organization.

How can charging a service fee benefit the organization?

The service fee can help you in one or more ways when it comes to making sure your pricing takes care of your costs. It can help cover costs associated with day-to-day operations, costs that you incur when processing online payments such as credit card costs as well as to adapt to changing times and increasing costs (caused due to exceptional situations like covid-19 or just to adjust for inflation).

If you’ve already spent a ton of time going over your pricing strategy and don’t want to change it, the service fee works as a quick fix to make sure your expenses are recovered.

Where can I find the Service Fee feature in SmartRec?

The Service fee app is free and available through the App store. Once activated, you can find it under Discounts and fees > Service Fee as seen below.

If your organization no longer wishes to charge a service fee, you can deactivate the app in the app store (if it is activated).

How do I set it up?

Setup is simple. Just follow these steps:

Give it a name (if you don’t, we’ll use ‘Service fee’ on the invoice by default)
Assign a ledger code (this helps track the income generated by the service fee)
Decide whether you want to charge a dollar amount, a percentage of the invoice total, or a combination of both (if you go with a combination, we will calculate the percentage before adding the dollar amount)
Decide if you want to exempt donations and merchandise from the service fee
Decide which taxes you want to apply to the service fee

Where can I apply the service fee?

The new and improved service fee is now applied more universally whenever an invoice is created.

Keep in mind, that whenever an administrator passes a transaction or makes a purchase on a client’s behalf – they will have the option to override the service fee through the back office, as seen below.