Payment Data and Analytics: The Key to Unlocking Revenue Growth
More than ever, businesses rely on analytics to improve their products or services and maximize revenue. The thing is, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to fully optimize your company’s revenue opportunities without deep insight into your data. This is particularly true with payments.
Do you really have the data you need to manage your payments effectively? Keep reading to find out.
What is a payment transaction?
A payment transaction refers to when a customer initiates a purchase or exchange of funds with a business or person. Transactions can be made via credit card or debit card, healthcare cards with FSA funds, cash, check, account-to-account via ACH, or alternative payment methods like Apple Pay and Google Pay.
Providing a variety of payment methods to choose from is becoming a necessity as more than 40% of consumers will abandon the checkout process if they can’t pay the way they want to.
Choosing to offer multiple payment methods is an easy choice. Where it gets tricky is the fees. This is because each transaction type is assessed with different processing fees. On top of that, your industry determines your interchange fees.
That’s why payment data is so important.
Unfortunately, most payments providers don't allow you to see transaction-level details. Instead, you’re typically restricted to only viewing settlement amounts. This limits your ability to optimize revenue on transactions. It also hinders your ability to plan your revenue strategy for future growth as effectively as you could with more information.
Why reporting and payment analytics features are so important
Having full transparency into how payment transactions are broken down is critical to optimizing and growing payments revenue. With the right data and reporting features, you gain insight into the complete transaction lifecycle and can better determine your customer lifetime value (CLV).
But how does this help you grow and predict revenue?
For starters, payment analytics give you a better idea of what payment methods your customers prefer. You can also see your average transaction size, how much your customers are spending, how often they buy, and even when they make their purchases.
This can be invaluable for sales forecasting as it can help you identify possible incentives for increased spending, helps you better optimize fee profiles for maximum yields, and can help build more effective marketing campaigns.
You can use payment data to personalize offers to current customers, as well as to hone in on your target audience to attract new customers.
If your platform accepts payments on behalf of other merchants, your merchants will find transaction visibility especially beneficial, as it allows them to maximize their growth too. It can also help foster loyalty between them and your brand, which can increase their CLV.
Dispute and chargeback analytics
More payment data also means more insight into chargeback rates. This is because you’re able to see more details about the point of sale. You’re able to pinpoint trends and/or problem merchants as it makes it easier for you to identify suspicious activity. Paired with real-time fraud detection, payment data can potentially help you reduce chargebacks and fraudulent transactions.
And this is good for your bottom line.
What’s in the data?: The importance of transaction visibility
Most providers don’t show you how fees are broken down and where they’re going per transaction. Instead, they only give you limited information, such as a simple settlement amount. To fully appreciate the difference comprehensive transaction visibility makes, let’s take a look at the level of detail we provide here at Finix.
As you can see from Finix’s example report above, you have access to a lot of data.
But that’s not all.
At Finix, you can also see each fee type and amount, the payment type, card network, and any other associated fee.
We also let you view details on associated fees. This tells you the fee type (e.g. card fixed) and subtype (e.g. platform fee).
Create data-driven revenue strategies and maximize your payments with Finix reports
Finix offers a wide range of payment reports and data that you can actually act on. Along with deep visibility into daily and monthly transactions, you’ll have access to pre-defined reports that detail all activity in your account.
Our goal is to make this information as easy to find as possible. In fact, as soon as you log in to your dashboard, you’ll see your most important financials on your home page. This includes your daily and weekly payment analytics, as well as year-to-date card sales and chargeback counts, volume, rates, and more.
Here’s a list of the key metrics you can easily find on the homepage of our dashboard and use to quickly understand and analyze the performance of your payments operations:
Daily and weekly total gross payment volume*
Daily and weekly settlement volume
Daily refunds
Weekly fees generated*
Net revenue
Active and onboarded merchants (YTD)*
Card sales (YTD)*
Chargeback count, volume, and rate (YTD)
* Applies to software platforms only
We also have downloadable report options that can be shared across teams and imported into external analytics tools. Here’s a rundown of reports most used by our customers:
Strategic metrics:
Net profit: Access insights into your payments profitability, including details on all the fees that were collected and how each fee was used for interchange and assessments, revenue shares, and program fees.
Transaction interchange: Provides details on daily and monthly per-transaction fees and costs, including interchange.
Finance data
Fees: See where the money is going on every transaction. Our fee reports include a list of all fees collected, network fees passed through, and any program fees that were charged.
Fee profile: Access daily and monthly reports about your onboarded merchants1 and the fees that were applied to their specific transactions.
Operations, reconciliation, and exceptions management
Transactions: View details for all sales, captures, refunds, failed sales, and reversals, along with fees and cost information, plus payout details.
Settlements: Access daily and monthly reports for merchant settlements and applications, including those not yet funded.
Authorizations: Authorization reports include daily and monthly data on authorized and failed transactions.
Funding instructions: View details for every payout that was returned, including the reason code for why the funding instruction failed.
Disputes: Access daily and monthly data for all disputes, including wins, losses, and expired disputes.
Risk management
Disputes Historical: This report lets you view historical per-merchant chargeback metrics. You’ll see how they’re processing chargebacks and can quickly identify merchants with the highest disputes.
More payment data means more growth potential for your business
Choosing a payments provider (like Finix) that offers transaction visibility and a robust reporting solution can make a major difference for businesses of all sizes. With better payment data at your fingertips, you’ll be more empowered to improve customer experiences, make informed business decisions, and create stronger revenue strategies.
Want to be the hero of revenue growth for your company? Download our ebook Payment Operations: The Unsung Heroes of Revenue Growth, which breaks down all the ways Finix helps teams unlock their super payment powers.