One of the most confusing parts of credit card processing is that the merchant's daily batch statement that is either printed out from their terminal (in the case of a physical merchant) or emailed from their payment gateway such as Authorize.net (in the case of an online merchant) does not match the amount that is put into their bank account. 

The reason is that the Merchant Account Providers usually use what is called "Daily Discounting" which basically means that they subtract the discount from your sales each day and only deposit the amount left over into your bank account. This isn't a problem in itself except that most business owners like to know where each dollar is going and find this approach disconcerting.

Fortunately some Merchant Account Providers also provide Monthly Discounting, where the amount the merchant processes is deposited into their account on a daily basis, but the amount they owe the Merchant Account Providers isn't debited until the end of the month.

Monthly Discounting is preferable in our opinion because it allows the merchant to easily confirm that you are only getting charged the amount that you see on your bill without requiring the merchant to painfully reconcile 30 different transactions each month.

Most Merchant Account Providers don't like to offer monthly discounting for two reasons:

1. It increases the risk that they won't get paid for their work (if your bank account is empty at the end of the month)

2. They make money holding the daily discounted funds.  Imagine that you are a merchant whose typical monthly discount is $2,500; in this case daily discounting allows the Merchant Account Provider to hold an average of $1,250 extra of your money over the course of the month.  At a 8% annual interest rate that equates to an extra $8 / month.  It's not a lot, but when taken over thousands of merchants, the float can be an important revenue stream for the Merchant Account Providers.

However, for merchants that are willing to bargain and comparison shop, they can usually find a good Merchant Account Provider that is willing to forego their $8 of float in order to provide clear billing.