Visa's invoices follow the same idea as Mastercard's: every fee is a coded line with a quantity, a rate and an amount. The identifiers, the portal and the labels are different. This guide covers what is specific to Visa. The routine for checking the lines works the same way for both schemes.
Who Visa bills
Visa bills its clients through their Business ID, or BID. A group can hold several BIDs, for example one per legal entity or per country, and each is billed on its own. Your card ranges, the BINs, sit under a BID.
Before you read any invoice, list your BIDs and the BINs under each one. It is the map you need to place every charge.
If you issue through a BIN sponsor or a processor, Visa bills them, not you. Your share arrives on their invoice, often grouped under a few lines. Ask them for the Visa billing lines for your BINs, so you can check them yourself.
Where to find the invoice
Invoices, billing detail and Visa's price tables are on Visa Online, Visa's portal for its clients. Your Visa Online administrator manages access. As with Mastercard, the invoice is a summary. Export the detail behind it for any real check.
Visa announces fee changes to its clients in Visa Business News. Keep the notices that concern your region and products. They tell you when a rate changed and why a new line appeared.
What each part of a line means
Field names differ by region and by report, so we use plain names here.
| Part | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| BID | The client the line is billed to. |
| BIN | The card range the activity came from, where a fee is billed per range. |
| Billing line | A code and a description for the fee. Match on the code, never on the description alone. |
| Units | What was counted: transactions, messages, cards, accounts or an amount of payment volume. |
| Rate | The price per unit, a share of volume, or a flat amount. |
| Amount | Units times rate, in the billing currency. |
| Period | The time the charge covers. Corrections for earlier periods appear on later invoices. |
The fees you will see
- Fixed fees for being a client and holding ranges, such as license and BIN fees.
- Service assessments charged on the payment volume of your cards.
- Processing fees per transaction or message, for authorization, clearing and settlement.
- Fees on cross-border activity.
- Optional services you enrolled in, such as account updating, tokens, fraud tools and reports.
- Fees tied to how transactions are handled, for example when Visa answers authorizations on your behalf because your systems did not respond in time.
Incentives and credits
Many issuers have an agreement with Visa that pays incentives, for example for volume growth or for issuing certain products. Depending on the agreement, incentives arrive as credits on the invoice or as separate payments.
Netting is where this goes wrong. When credits are netted against fees, the total can look normal while a credit is missing, late or smaller than the agreement says. Check incentives against the agreement on their own, before you look at the net total.
A routine to check it
- Pull as many months of billing detail as you can for every BID in scope.
- Put all lines in one table with the same columns: period, BID, BIN, billing line code, description, units, rate and amount.
- Total the period by type of fee and by billing line, and sort by amount.
- Check the rate of each large line against Visa's price tables for that period, or against your agreement.
- Check units against your processor's counts of transactions, cards and volume.
- Check that every incentive in your agreement arrived, in full and on time.
- List the optional services and the BINs they are enrolled on, and ask who uses each one.
- Look for lines on BINs you no longer issue on, and for periods billed twice.
Our guide to the Mastercard invoice explains each of these steps in more detail. They work the same way for Visa.
Where the invoice can mislead
Ranges you moved or sold
After a portfolio sale, a processor migration or a move to 8-digit BINs, fees can stay on the old range or the old BID. Check that each range is billed only where it should be.
Lines for old periods
Corrections can arrive months after the activity. Match each one to the period and the line it corrects.
Currencies
Some fees are priced in one currency and billed in another. Compare rates in the pricing currency, and check the conversion as a separate step.
What to do with what you find
Send billing errors to Visa with the BID, the billing line, the periods and your evidence, through your Visa account team or client support. Cancel services you no longer use through the same team, then check the following invoices to confirm the line stops. Fees caused by how your transactions are sent get fixed with your processor.
In the US these fees are usually called network fees. Everything in this guide applies to them.
If you would rather have this done for you, that is what our scheme fee review does: your Visa and Mastercard invoices, one scheme or both, over the period you choose, read line by line, with the action that removes each fee you do not need.
This guide is general information, based on public sources and on how scheme billing commonly works, and it is not advice for your situation. Your agreement with Visa and Visa's price tables for your region take precedence.