POS Terminal Charges: Fees, VAT and Stamp Duty Made Simple

The pain: the silent partner who never sleeps

Every POS agent has a business partner they never invited: the provider. On every withdrawal, the terminal quietly takes a provider fee. Card transactions can attract a debit fee. VAT rides on top of fees. And on qualifying transfers of ₦10,000 and above, stamp duty takes its ₦50.

Individually these are small. Together they are the difference between the profit you think you made and the money that actually lands. An agent who collects ₦100 per withdrawal and assumes ₦100 is profit can be wrong by half. And because the deductions happen inside the settlement, most agents never see them at all. They just notice, month after month, that the account grows slower than the notebook says it should.

Guessing an average ("I lose about 30 percent to charges") is not a fix. Fee tables have bands, some fees apply to some transaction types and not others, and averages hide exactly the transactions where you are losing money.

What Gazeloft does instead: itemise, never guess

In the POS space, terminal and provider charges are itemised per transaction, never estimated:

• Provider fee, debit fee, VAT and stamp duty can each be recorded on any transaction.
• A per-type matrix knows which fees apply to which transaction types, so a withdrawal offers the withdrawal-relevant fees and an airtime sale does not nag you about stamp duty.
• Fee chips put the relevant fees one tap away on the entry form.
• A shared provider fee presets catalog per space lets you enter your provider's fee table once. After that, every entry pulls the right figures from the preset instead of your memory. If you run the stand with workers, they use the same catalog, so everyone records fees the same way.

And on the other side of the desk, the charge the customer pays is always typed in by you. Gazeloft never auto-derives it, because street pricing varies from junction to junction and hour to hour. Your price is your business decision. The provider's price is a fact to be recorded. The app keeps both, separately.

Step-by-step: setting up fee presets

In the app:

1. Open your POS space settings and find the provider fee presets.
2. Create a preset for each band of your provider's fee table. For example: "Withdrawal up to ₦5,000: provider fee ₦25", "Withdrawal ₦5,001 to ₦10,000: provider fee ₦45", and so on, including debit fee, VAT and stamp duty where your provider applies them.
3. Save. The presets belong to the space, so every device and every worker on this space sees the same catalog.

Recording a transaction with fees:

1. Start a new entry and pick the type. The fee chips shown match the per-type matrix.
2. Enter the amount and type the charge you collected from the customer.
3. Tap the preset or the individual fee chips. The provider fee, debit fee, VAT and stamp duty fill in as itemised lines.
4. Save. Profit for this entry is now your charge minus the itemised fees, exactly.

On the web dashboard: the same presets catalog and the same chips are available at gazeloft.com, so evening batch entry from a laptop applies identical fees.

Worked example: the ₦300 charge that was really ₦170

Fatima's customer withdraws ₦20,000. Fatima charges ₦300, her street rate. Her provider's table for this band says: provider fee ₦53.75, debit fee ₦20, VAT of ₦5.53 on the fees. The settlement qualifies for stamp duty of ₦50.

She records: withdrawal ₦20,000, charge ₦300, then taps her "₦20k band" preset which fills provider fee ₦53.75, debit fee ₦20.00, VAT ₦5.53, stamp duty ₦50.00. Total deductions: ₦129.28.

Her real profit on this transaction: 300.00 minus 129.28 = ₦170.72. Not ₦300. If Fatima serves 40 such withdrawals in a day, the gap between assumed profit (₦12,000) and real profit (about ₦6,829) is over ₦5,000 a day, more than ₦150,000 a month of imaginary money she might have been planning to spend.

Now flip it into a pricing decision: on small ₦2,000 withdrawals where she charges ₦100 and the provider takes roughly ₦60, she keeps ₦40. Seeing that line by line, Fatima can decide to nudge her small-withdrawal price to ₦150 or steer customers toward amounts where her margin is healthy. That decision is impossible with a guessed average and obvious with an itemised ledger.

There is also a reconciliation prize at month end. When Fatima's provider statement arrives, her recorded fee lines should add up to what the provider actually deducted. If the statement says ₦38,400 in fees and her ledger says ₦36,900, she has a ₦1,500 question to ask her provider, with evidence in hand. Agents who never itemise cannot even see that a deduction was wrong, let alone dispute it.

Tips and pitfalls

• Set up presets on day one. The catalog turns four fee fields into one tap and makes your profit figure trustworthy from the first entry.
• Update presets when your provider changes rates. Providers revise fee tables. When they do, edit the preset once and every future entry is correct.
• Do not average. The whole point is that a ₦2,000 withdrawal and a ₦100,000 withdrawal have completely different fee profiles. Averages hide your loss-makers.
• Watch stamp duty on deposits and transfers. The ₦50 applies on qualifying transactions of ₦10,000 and above. On a thin ₦200 charge, it is a quarter of your gross gone.
• Remember: the customer charge is yours to type. Never expect the app to fill it. If you gave a loyal customer a discount, record the discounted charge so profit stays honest.

Know what the silent partner takes

You cannot negotiate with fees you cannot see. Itemise every deduction, set your presets once, and watch your real margin per transaction at gazeloft.com.