This has never happened to me, I was at a bar on July 16, I gave the bartender my card to pay my bill, so as far as I knew I paid. Yesterday I see a 80 dollar charge. Why would this place wait so long to process my bill. This could be very harmful, especially if someone was close to being negative. My buddy was also charged and got a late bill. Is this normal?
I have had places wait a long time before processing a charge. A hotel in France a few years back took six weeks and this was for a £200 plus bill.
I assumed that the slip (it was an old-fashioned manual system) had either been mislaid, or they waited until they had a load of them and processed them all at once. In any case - I knew that the charge was pending, so, if I had been pushing my limit, I would have allowed for it.
I suspect that with manual slips, it is not unusual at all.
I once had a change show up a year after I had put it on the card. They had evidently lost the slip; when I questioned it, they showed me the slip that had been submitted.
It’s less likely with a swipe card.
If you swiped your card, and it took >30 days before it showed up as a charge that would be odd, since the swipe is an instant transaction. If it was a manual transaction, that some places still do, I can see it taking weeks or months before it gets processed. My guess is that it was a manual transaction and the slip was misplaced and then found. For cash flow reasons it’s usually in the best interest of the business to process the transaction sooner rather than later.
I ALWAYS keep receipts of what I charge. Did they give you a receipt?
Be sure you were charged what you should have been charged and were charged only once. (i.e. are they charging you a second time for the same thing?)
My wife’s hairdresser was going into bankruptcy. He’d held off dumping his credit card machine for a few weeks. When it looked like the bank would take it all instead without making an appreciable dent in his situation, he erased the machine - his customers were more important than the bank.
This was12 years ago. I think in those days the idea was to dump the machine each day; nowadays I think this is instantaneous. But then, I hear a lot of US banking is pretty far behind the times…
The only way I can see this causing a problem is if you have a billing period where you don’t expect any charges so you don’t look at your statement/online account and end up with a late fee. However, you’ll have a tough time proving that wasn’t your fault. The credit card company may well tell say ‘hey, we sent/emailed you a statement, it’s not our fault you didn’t look at it’. You may be able to call up your credit card and explain the circumstances (which they’ll be able to see) and if you’ve had a good history with them, they’ll probably waive any fees.
As for why it took so long, my guess is that they only close out their machine once in a while instead of daily.
If they don’t do a lot of business and/or don’t need the money and/or started working with a new processor, that may happen, especially considering that each time a batch is closed, it creates a deposit (and many times two or more deposits) and typically each deposit incurs a fee with the ban. For example, if each batch creates two deposits (Amex and everything else) and each deposit costs them $0.60, they can save themselves nearly $35/mo (or just over $400/yr). That might be worth it to them.
FTR, quickly glancing through Visa merchant rules, I don’t see anything saying they can’t do that.
What the hairdresser did there sounds highly illegal. Was there any sort of legal follow-up, such as prosecution?