Fees and Payment Method Controls

Surcharges have been switched off

In line with the 2026 card scheme rule changes and RBA and ACCC advice, Sawfish no longer passes payment processing fees on to your customers. No payment method adds a surcharge to what the payer pays - card, PayTo, PayID, direct debit, wallet or Tap to Pay.

Your customer pays the invoice amount. The processing fee comes out of your settlement.

What this changed

If you were on-charging fees, that stopped automatically - there was nothing to turn off and no setting to change:

• The on-charge toggles are gone from Settings → Accounting → Payment Methods, including the per-card-type ones for Visa, Mastercard and Amex.
• Public invoice and batch payment pages no longer show any fee line under a payment method. The “No additional fees” labels are gone too, because they now apply to everything.
• Agreement signing pages no longer show a fee against card, PayTo or direct debit.

Check your pricing

The fee hasn’t disappeared - it’s moved onto you. Your settlement is the invoice amount less the processing fee for whatever method the customer chose. If your margins were built assuming customers wore the card fee, they need revisiting.

Your rates

Settings → Accounting → Payment Methods now shows the rate you’re charged for each payment type, so you can see what a payment actually costs you:

What you’ll see	Meaning
1.6% + $0.30	Percentage of the payment plus a fixed amount
A cap	Where the rate has a maximum, it’s shown with the rate
No fee	That type costs you nothing
Not set	No rate is configured for your tier - contact the Sawfish team

Cards are broken out as Visa, Mastercard and American Express, each with domestic and international rates, because they differ. PayTo and PayID each show a single rate.

Wallet and Tap to Pay rates aren’t shown yet

Apple Pay, Google Pay and Tap to Pay run through Windcave, and their rates aren’t on the settings page yet. Ask the Sawfish team for those.

All quoted rates include GST.

Enable and disable methods

This part is unchanged. Each payment method - Credit Card, PayTo, PayID and Bank Transfer - can be switched on or off for your organisation, under Settings → Accounting → Payment Methods. A disabled method simply doesn’t appear on your customers’ payment pages.

Choosing what to accept is now purely about what suits your customers and what each method costs you, since none of them changes what the customer pays.

Bank Transfer is the odd one out: switching it on shows your bank account details on the invoice so the customer can pay you directly.

Chart of Accounts

At the bottom of the same page, pick the account code your processing fees are posted to in Xero or MYOB - something like 330 - Bank Charges - Merchant Fee.

This matters more now than it used to

When customers wore the fee, this mapping was optional housekeeping. Now that every fee comes out of your settlement, it’s the account your merchant fees land in for the whole year. Pick it deliberately, and check with whoever does your books.

Changes here aren’t live until you press Save preferences.

If you use MYOB, the same section has a Record fees in Undeposited Funds toggle. It saves as soon as you switch it, and decides whether each fee lands next to its payment in Prepare Bank Deposit or in Prepare Electronic Payments. See Reconciling Sawfish payments.

Bank transfer and PayID are usually your cheapest

With surcharging off, the method mix hits your bottom line directly. If a customer is paying a large invoice, pointing them at PayID or bank transfer rather than an Amex card is worth real money.

Where the fee shows up

The fee is deducted before the money reaches you, so you’ll see it in two places:

• On the payment itself in your Payments list.
• In your payout - the deposit is net of fees. See Payouts and your wallet.