With credit card surcharging in Lightspeed Golf, you can pass processing fees on to members who pay for their house and family accounts with a credit card. This feature must be enabled in Lightspeed Golf and applies exclusively to card-not-present (CNP) house account payments.

Understanding surcharges and sales tax

Lightspeed Golf does not calculate or add sales tax to credit card surcharges. The amount your members are charged is the surcharge only. For example, a $3 surcharge is collected as $3, with no tax added on top.

Surcharge fees are recorded on sales transactions as both a specific Item and a Payment type. You must map both of these entities accordingly in your Accounting software.

Surcharges do not apply to debit card transactions.

Surcharging is available only to Lightspeed Payments users in the United States and Canada, excluding Quebec, Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Puerto Rico.

Credit card surcharging is subject to applicable laws, card network rules, and processor requirements, and may not be permitted or available in all jurisdictions.

You can set a custom surcharge rate in your Lightspeed Payments portal, up to the maximum processing fee allowed for your region. 

Depending on your jurisdiction, the surcharges you collect may be taxable. If they are, you are responsible for tracking and remitting any tax owed, as this is not calculated or reported for you. For example, at a 10% tax rate, you would owe $0.30 on a $3 surcharge, remitted as part of your regular tax filings. 

Surcharging rules and tax treatment vary by location, and it is your responsibility to surcharge a permitted amount and account for any applicable taxes. If you are unsure how surcharges should be taxed in your area, we recommend speaking with a tax professional.

Enabling surcharging

Once enabled, the system automatically calculates and adds these fees to both manual and recurring payments, and updates your financial reports to save you time. Customers will see these fees clearly during checkout or on their billing statements, giving them the option to avoid the charge by paying with cash, check, or ACH.

1. Navigate to Reports > Lightspeed Payments > Settings > Payments.
2. Click the toggle to Enable surcharging.
3. Click Edit to adjust the surcharge rate for all card brands.

Processing surcharges through manual payments

When a member or employee processes a one-time payment with a credit card, the system automatically calculates the surcharge and adds it to their total before they complete the transaction.

Employees will see a Credit card surcharge amount in the payment window.

Members will see a Credit card surcharge amount in the payment window. A notice will also be present explaining that they can pay through ACH, cash, or check to avoid a credit card surcharge.

Processing surcharges through automatic billing

For recurring house and family account payments, the surcharge is automatically collected and added to the customer's billing statement, eliminating the need for manual calculations.

Employees will see a Credit card surcharge amount when enabling automatic billing.

Members will see a notification that a surcharge amount is automatically applied to credit card payments when viewing their statements.

Viewing surcharges on customer statements

A new Fees column is now visible in the Golf customer statement's payment history to help easily identify charges.

Member account statements also explicitly break out Processing fees in the summary section and list house account payments as zero-dollar line items with applied totals.