If your association passes card processing costs to the payer, Rhythm can add that fee automatically when a card payment charges an invoice. The fee comes from your checkout settings, and it works as an automatic surcharge. It is not a separate convenience-fee tool with its own terms or policy controls. This article explains when Rhythm adds the fee, why it sometimes does not, and why an invoice sometimes cannot be paid by card.
Where the Fee Comes From
The card processing fee comes from the checkout settings for the order behind the invoice. When those checkout settings include a processing fee, Rhythm adds a fee line to the invoice right before it charges the credit card, not when it creates the invoice. Only credit card payments include the fee. If someone pays the same invoice by electronic check, Rhythm does not add one. The fee is based on the invoice's full balance, not on one specific line, so a $0.00 line, such as a free add-on, does not change the fee.
Because Rhythm calculates the fee only when it charges a card, an invoice you create directly in the Console does not get the fee automatically. If you need a processing fee on a manually created invoice, add it as a line yourself.
There is no single setting that turns on the card processing fee for your whole Rhythm account. You configure it separately in each area that sells something, such as a store's checkout settings under Setup › Stores. Each area needs its own processing-fee percentage before you can turn on the fee there. Membership, committee, and event registration orders each have their own equivalent checkout settings.
The processing fee is also separate from your payment gateway or merchant account setup. Your merchant account's processor credentials control whether Rhythm can charge cards at all. They do not turn the processing fee on or off. A fee your association or processor charges outside Rhythm's checkout settings, such as one configured directly with the processor, does not appear on the invoice in the Console or the Portal. The percentage you charge may also reflect rates or terms specific to your Rhythm account rather than a fixed platform default, so check your own checkout settings instead of assuming a standard rate.
To turn on the fee, you also need a miscellaneous product in Finance & Billing › Setup › Miscellaneous Products so the fee has somewhere to post in your books. See the related article on miscellaneous products below. Because Rhythm records the fee through that product, reports and queries that list the fee may not always show which product or order it came from, especially outside event registrations. A query field meant to show whether a card fee applied is not always reliable. If you need to confirm that a specific order was charged the fee, check the invoice lines, a debit memo, or the payment details.
Warning
The card processing fee does not reliably distinguish a debit card from a credit card. Testing and customer reports show that Rhythm can add the fee to a debit card payment the same way it adds it to a credit card payment. Rhythm adds the fee to the total before the payment reaches your payment gateway. A Stripe-linked merchant account can sometimes exempt debit cards from the fee under a separate option, but confirm that for your own setup instead of assuming it applies. Because some card networks, processors, and jurisdictions only permit a surcharge on credit cards, review your compliance obligations before you turn on the fee if payers may use debit cards. Rhythm does not currently guarantee a way to collect this fee that satisfies every merchant agreement or law that restricts debit-card surcharges.
Warning
Public invoice payment links do not use these fee-related checkout settings. Someone who pays from a shared link without signing in can pay by card without being charged the processing fee, even when the invoice's order would otherwise require it. If that matters for your association, restrict or turn off public invoice payments for those invoices instead of relying on the fee to apply there.
Why the Fee Sometimes Isn't Added
Rhythm adds the fee automatically only when all of these conditions are true:
- The invoice's order has checkout settings that define a processing fee. Without that setting, Rhythm does not add a fee.
- The payment is processed as a card payment, not as an electronic check or another payment method.
- Rhythm adds the fee before it actually charges the card. If the charge fails afterward, or if a later step fails to save it, the fee stays on the invoice. If the card authorization never completes, Rhythm does not add the fee. For example, if an automatic renewal's card charge fails to authorize, Rhythm does not charge a processing fee for that attempt.
If a payer chooses a pay-later option at checkout, such as being billed later or invoiced by the organization, Rhythm does not calculate the fee yet because it is not charging a card. Rhythm adds the fee only when a card payment eventually pays the invoice. If you keep a pay-later option turned on, you cannot guarantee that every otherwise-eligible transaction gets the fee because the payer can choose to pay later instead of paying by card at that moment. To guarantee the fee on every eligible transaction, turn off pay-later options.
The merchant account that processes the payment also matters. This fee is supported only for payments that go through a merchant account linked to Rhythm's current processor. A legacy merchant account that is still on the older Rhythm Payments processor does not support the fee, even with otherwise identical checkout settings.
Manually changing a price after the fact does not recalculate a fee that Rhythm has already added. If you adjust a registration or order line's price by hand, or manually override a registration's total while processing its payment, the card processing fee already on the invoice can still reflect the original amount instead of the adjusted amount. Check the fee after a manual price change and correct it if needed. Similarly, after a card payment goes through without the fee, such as when checkout settings had no fee configured at the time, Rhythm cannot go back and add that fee to the same payment afterward. If you need to recover it, add a debit to a current invoice instead.
Tip
Because the invoice and the payment each track whether a fee has already been added, retrying a payment after a failure can occasionally add a second fee line. If you see an invoice with two processing fee lines, check whether the same payment was retried after an earlier attempt. In a split payment, disabling the fee does not always stop its prompt from showing. If a payer splits a payment and enters a card as the second payment method, the checkout screen can still show the fee section and preselect covering it, even with the fee turned off elsewhere. Report it if you see this.
When a Card Charge Fails or Looks Uncertain
A card charge can be declined, or leave you unsure whether it went through, for reasons that have nothing to do with the processing fee.
- A mismatched billing address or ZIP code is a common cause of a decline. Compare the billing address entered in Rhythm with the address on file for the card. Rhythm Payments also checks the billing address against Google's address verification. Manually re-entering the billing address, instead of relying on one that auto-populated from a saved record, can resolve some declines.
- A decline message doesn't always mean the charge never went through. Verifying the billing ZIP is a reasonable first step for an authentication decline, but confirm the result against your payment gateway's settlement records before you decide the payment failed. A separate processing issue can occasionally leave a charge settled even though the payer saw a decline.
- An address problem isn't always the real cause. A payment that looks like an address-verification failure can actually be caused by an incorrect card number. Confirm the card number before you assume the address is wrong.
- An order confirmation email isn't proof the card was charged. The email can show an order summary and the card's last four digits even when the charge did not succeed. Check the payment record directly if you need to confirm that the charge went through.
- An invoice that still shows a balance after a card attempt likely means the processor declined the charge, even if the payer believed it went through.
- Rarely, a payment can be fully captured while its invoice still shows a balance due. If an order and its payment both show a zero balance, but the linked invoice still shows an open balance, this can be an intermittent capture issue rather than something you did wrong. Contact Support if you see this mismatch.
If you are troubleshooting a decline for a payer, trying the charge again with Quick Charge in Rhythm Payments can sometimes succeed when the original attempt failed. Escalate to Support if it still does not.
When the Invoice's Batch Has Already Posted
Rhythm normally adds the fee as an extra line on the invoice. After an invoice's batch has posted or been downloaded to your accounting software, the invoice itself can no longer change. In that case, Rhythm charges the fee through a debit memo against the invoice instead of adding a line to it. If the invoice has no line with a line identifier, Rhythm cannot apply the fee this way, and the payment is refused.
Why a Payer Can't Pay by Card
A few separate issues can keep a payer from paying an invoice by card:
The checkout settings restrict cards. If the order behind an invoice has checkout settings that do not allow card payments, such as when the amount is above a threshold your association set, the payment screens do not offer a card option for that invoice. When that restriction is a range instead of fully off, the range needs only an upper bound; your association does not have to set a lower one. The screens that show payment options enforce this rule, but not every path that could submit a payment does. The invoices you select and the amount you apply can also change whether card payment is offered, so reevaluate this as you change your selections, not only when the payment screen first loads. A pay-later invoice keeps its own copy of the order's card restriction settings, so later payment screens, such as Portal invoice payment and Receive Payment, can still enforce the same card limits your checkout settings originally set, even if the invoice is paid well after the order was placed.
The invoice has no billing contact assigned. Without a billing contact on the invoice, the credit card entry fields do not appear on the Receive Payment screen, and saved card options do not appear in Portal payment testing either. Assign a billing contact to the invoice, and the card option appears.
The product needs a different merchant account. If an invoice includes products tied to different merchant accounts, one card or bank payment cannot cover all of them. The products must be paid as separate payments, one per merchant account, and Rhythm refuses a payment that tries to combine them. If Rhythm refuses a combined payment for this reason, pay each invoice separately instead. This also gives you a way to charge different cards to different invoices from the same order, such as dues on one card and a related donation on another, by paying each invoice on its own rather than trying to split one combined payment.
Related Reading
Receiving a payment, configuring card payments on the Portal and publicly shared invoice links, and setting up merchant accounts are covered in their own articles, including how to see which merchant account a product is tied to.