Multi-location payment reporting

[marmar888]

Hey all, I've been looking at the car wash space as a potential investment and trying to get my head around the operations side before I do anything serious.

Most of what I find online covers site selection, equipment, and membership models. What I can't find much on is the back-office and payment side, specifically how operators actually track revenue across locations day-to-day.

A few things I'm trying to understand:

- Who are you using for payment processing? Sounds like WorldPay and CryptoPay come up a lot. Are there real alternatives for unattended/tunnel operations?
- How do you actually pull reporting across multiple locations? Is there a dashboard that does it?
- What surprised you most about the payment/back-office side when you got in?

Any takes appreciated.

 

[Wash4Life]

Who are you using for payment processing? Sounds like WorldPay and CryptoPay come up a lot. Are there real alternatives for unattended/tunnel operations?

For our self-service bays, we use CryptoPay and WorldPay together. The way it works is that CryptoPay has the card processing technology while they use WorldPay for the payment processing. IF you go with CryptoPay, you're with WorldPay by default. You'll find a lot of the tech has specific payment processors.

Nayax is another popular option people use.

The tunnel we have uses Washify. We have PDQ Laswerwash 4000's and M-5's that depending on the location use either Priority Payment or PlugnPay.

Our car wash clubs have migrated toward EverWash.

- How do you actually pull reporting across multiple locations? Is there a dashboard that does it?

EverWash and CryptoPay use dashboars. The rest we have to log into.

What surprised you most about the payment/back-office side when you got in?

For me it is how incompetent WorldPay is. The wait times are astronomical, and you'll end up with a non-English speaker who can't do anything to help you.

 

[Roz]

ICS as well as other paystations have dashboards to report data from multiple locations assuming they all are using the same manufacturer

 

[marmar888]

Got it, thank you both. WorldPay sounds like a pain. Is it just a pain when you need to call them, or are there other issues?

 

[Roz]

It is hit or miss with WP. Get a a good rep or tech and they are great. Once setup you really should not need to call them. Frustrating thing is that you pay different fees (overall) depending on the hardware and size of the transactions. You do not have a choice in our industry for some of the more popular hardware like CryptoPay devices so don’t overthink things. Go with the hardware setup that works best for you and your customers.