(1888PressRelease)
October 25, 2008 - Boston, MA – UniBul Merchant Services announced today the launch of its new guide titled Best Practices for Sales Receipts. The Guide was developed to help merchants issue sales receipts that adequately document each transaction and include all necessary information and the cardholder’s signature. The authors advise merchants to design a process of issuing sales receipts and train their sales staff in implementing it on a consistent basis to minimize customer disputes and chargebacks. The Guide’s main objective is to educate merchants on the basics of managing sales receipts and offers a step-by-step advice on how to achieve it.
The beginning chapters of the Guide offer a detailed review of the information that needs to be included in every sales receipt. The information includes obvious items such as description of the product or service being sold, the method and currency of the payment and the name of the merchant but also includes items that merchants may not know that are required, such as authorization number and a truncated credit card number, instead of the full 16-digit number.
A special attention has been given to the information that should not be included in sales receipts. The Credit Card Associations of Visa and MasterCard prohibit merchants from including in the sales receipt the cardholder’s personal identification number (PIN) and the Card Security Verification Code (the 3-digit number on the back of Visa, MasterCard and Discover cards and the 4-digit number on the front of American Express cards).
The process of obtaining the cardholder’s signature on the sales receipt is examined in great detail. Specific best practices are suggested to make sure that the signature is legitimate and matches the one in the signature panel on the back of the card.
Finally, the Guide reviews the issue of producing multiple sales receipts. It states that merchants are prohibited from issuing two or more sales receipts for a single transaction. There are several exceptions from this rule and they are explained. Similarly, merchants are prohibited from processing a card payment for only a part of the total transaction amount, with a few exceptions.
UniBul Merchant Services has developed its new Best Practices for Sales Receipts Guide as a comprehensive point of reference for both its customers and every other merchant in need of expertise in this area. It is available on the company’s website at http://www.unibulmerchantservices.com/best-practices-for-sales-receipts.
UniBul Merchant Services is a Boston, MA-based Independent Sales Organization (ISO), registered with Visa and MasterCard as a provider of payment processing services for US businesses.
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