Building a Proposal From a Statement in Under 10 Minutes

A proposal is not a rate sheet with a logo on it. It is a short argument built from the merchant’s own numbers, and it should be readable in ninety seconds by someone standing in a shop with a phone in one hand. Agents lose deals by sending four pages of pricing theory when a single page of arithmetic would have closed it.

Here is a structure that works, and how to produce it in the time between the statement arriving and the follow-up call.

The five blocks

Every effective proposal contains the same five things in the same order.

• Their numbers. Volume, transaction count, average ticket, and the period the statement covers. Stated as fact, with no commentary.
• What they pay now. Effective rate, plus fixed monthly fees totalled separately so the owner sees them as their own line.
• What they would pay. Your pricing applied to their actual volume, transaction count and mix, not to a generic example.
• The difference. One number, per month, with the annualised figure beneath it.
• What changes operationally. Tap to Pay instead of keying, ACH for large invoices, recurring billing for the plan book. This is the part competitors leave out and it is often worth more than the rate.

Anything else, company history, network logos, security boilerplate, goes on a second page the owner will not read, or nowhere at all.

Build it from the statement, not from a template

The arithmetic takes about ten minutes once you have a statement. Compute the effective rate. Split volume into card-present and card-not-present. Apply your rates to each side, add per-item fees at their real transaction count, and add any fixed fees on your side honestly.

With Paydigo pricing that is 2.60% + 15¢ on the in-person side, 2.90% + 30¢ on invoices, links and keyed volume, and no monthly account fee to add, with the single exception of the subscriptions platform at $49 a month with a 30-day free trial, which belongs in the proposal whenever recurring billing is part of the pitch.

If the merchant has commercial invoices, model bank payment separately: ACH at 1% capped at $10 is frequently the largest single line of savings in the whole proposal, and it is checkable arithmetic rather than a claim.

Be conservative on purpose

The temptation is to present the best case. Do the opposite: assume their mix stays exactly as it is, do not model behaviour changes into the headline number, and round your savings down.

Then show the operational upside separately, labelled as upside, “if you move field payments from keyed to tapped, that is a further $X a month.” A merchant who beats your projection stays for years. A merchant who misses it by ten percent stops trusting the rest of your numbers.

Every claim carries its disclosure

This is a discipline rather than a formality. Any savings figure should travel with the basis it was computed on: the statement month, the volume, the transaction count, the assumptions, and a note that card-brand pass-through costs vary with the merchant’s own card mix.

Put it in small type at the bottom of the same page as the claim, not in a separate document, not in an email that gets forgotten. When pricing is later questioned, the disclosure that travelled with the claim is what protects both of you.

Lock the pricing when you send it

The most common way a good proposal dies is time. You quote in week one, the owner decides in week four, and the pricing has moved or the invite has to be rebuilt, and now the number they remember is not the number in front of them.

Send the proposal as an invite whose pricing is frozen at send. In the Paydigo partner app the invite carries its pricing token, so the rate you quoted is the rate the merchant signs, and if they open it and you then need to change something, the app tells you the token is locked rather than silently re-pricing. That guarantee is worth stating out loud in the meeting.

The ten-minute workflow

In practice: read the statement and compute the effective rate; split present versus keyed; apply your pricing to both sides; add ACH where commercial invoices exist; total their fixed fees; write the five blocks; attach the disclosure; send it as a locked invite.

Ten minutes, one page, their numbers. That is a proposal that survives being forwarded to a bookkeeper, which is the real test, because in most small businesses the bookkeeper is the person who decides whether you were telling the truth.

What to take away

Use their numbers, not examples. Five blocks: their volume, what they pay, what they would pay, the difference, and what changes operationally. Model conservatively and label upside as upside. Attach the disclosure to the claim. Send it with pricing locked at invite so the quote survives the decision cycle.

Optional add-ons and conditional fees are separate: the subscriptions module ($49/mo) bills only if you turn it on; processor-required fees apply only if triggered — e.g., $19.95/mo if the annual PCI security check isn't completed (we walk you through it in ~5 minutes), $25/mo if over 10% of card-present transactions are non-EMV. Full fee schedule shown before you sign.