Payment processing should be the simplest part of running a business. Someone owes you money, they pay you, the money lands in your account, and your books reflect the transaction. That is four steps. Somehow, the payment processing industry has turned those four steps into a labyrinth of merchant accounts, gateway fees, batch settlements, manual reconciliation, and monthly statements that require an accounting degree to decode.
We built EEZYPAY because small businesses deserve payment processing that connects to their operations instead of creating a separate data silo that someone has to reconcile every week. Here is how we compare to the platforms dominating the market.
Square charges 2.6% plus 10 cents for in-person transactions and 2.9% plus 30 cents for online payments. Those are their published rates and, credit where due, Square is transparent about their pricing. What they are less transparent about is the hold policies, the next-day settlement delays, and the occasional account freeze that happens when their automated risk systems flag your business for processing more volume than expected.
Stripe charges 2.9% plus 30 cents for online transactions with volume discounts available for businesses processing over $80,000 per month. Stripe is a developer’s dream and a business owner’s headache. Their pricing is clear, but their product assumes you have a developer on staff to implement and maintain the integration. For small businesses, that implementation cost dwarfs the transaction fees.
PayPal charges 2.99% plus 49 cents for standard transaction fees, which is already the most expensive option on this list. Add in their habit of holding funds for new accounts, their buyer-friendly dispute resolution that occasionally rules against merchants with valid claims, and the fact that PayPal checkout redirects customers away from your website, and you have a payment processor that costs more while providing a worse experience for both you and your customers.
EEZYPAY publishes transparent per-transaction pricing with no monthly minimums, no annual contracts, and no hidden fees for chargebacks, PCI compliance, or account maintenance. We do not freeze accounts because your Tuesday was busier than your Monday. We do not hold settlement funds because our algorithm decided your business looks risky. You process payments, we deposit the funds on a predictable schedule, and we charge exactly what we said we would charge.
Here is the real cost of payment processing that nobody talks about: reconciliation. Every transaction you process through Square, Stripe, or PayPal creates a deposit in your bank account that someone has to match against the corresponding invoice in your accounting system. Square batches daily. Stripe settles on a rolling basis. PayPal deposits whenever it feels like it.
Your bookkeeper opens the bank feed, sees a deposit for $4,847.23 from Square, and now has to figure out which invoices that deposit covers. Was it the three invoices from Tuesday plus the two from Wednesday minus the refund from Monday? Maybe. Time to open Square’s reporting dashboard, cross-reference the transaction IDs, and manually match each payment to the correct invoice in QuickBooks or Xero. This process takes your bookkeeper hours every week, and any mistake creates a reconciliation discrepancy that takes even longer to find and fix.
EEZYPAY eliminates this entirely because payments processed through EEZYPAY are automatically matched to invoices in EEZYBOOKS. Customer pays invoice #1047? The payment is applied to invoice #1047, the receivable is cleared, the revenue is recognized, and the deposit is recorded against the correct bank account. No manual matching. No end-of-week reconciliation marathon. No discrepancies to hunt down.
This is not a nice-to-have feature. For small businesses processing dozens or hundreds of transactions per week, automatic reconciliation saves more in bookkeeper hours than it costs in transaction fees. Your payment processor should make your accountant’s life easier, not harder.
The disconnect between invoicing and payment collection is one of the most absurd inefficiencies in small business operations. You create an invoice in your accounting software, email it to the customer, the customer clicks a payment link, the payment processes through a separate gateway, the funds settle into your bank account, and then someone has to connect the dots between the payment and the original invoice.
Square Invoices allows you to create and send invoices with embedded payment links, which is a step in the right direction. But Square Invoices is a separate product from Square Point of Sale and Square Online, and the data does not always flow cleanly between them. If you also use a separate accounting system, you are still reconciling manually.
Stripe Invoicing provides invoice creation with built-in payment collection, and it is well-designed. However, Stripe assumes you are a developer or have access to one. Their invoicing is an API feature first and a user interface second. For a business owner who wants to send an invoice and get paid, the learning curve is steeper than it should be.
PayPal Invoicing works but sends your customers to PayPal’s interface to complete the payment, which adds friction and confusion. Some customers do not have PayPal accounts and are not interested in creating one just to pay your invoice.
EEZYPAY integrates the invoice-to-payment flow natively. An invoice created in EEZYBOOKS includes a payment link powered by EEZYPAY. The customer clicks the link, pays with their card, and the payment is applied to the invoice instantly. No redirect to a third-party site. No separate payment portal. No reconciliation step. The invoice goes from “sent” to “paid” to “deposited” to “reconciled” in one automated flow that neither you nor your bookkeeper needs to touch.
For service businesses, the best time to collect payment is when the work is done and the customer is happy. That means collecting payment on site, at the customer’s location, the moment the job is complete.
Square excels here. Their hardware ecosystem of readers, terminals, and stands is the best in the industry for in-person payment collection. If you need a dedicated point-of-sale terminal at a fixed location, Square’s hardware is hard to beat.
Stripe’s in-person presence is growing through Stripe Terminal, but their hardware options are more limited and their focus remains on online transactions. Stripe is an online-first platform adapting to in-person, not the other way around.
PayPal offers Zettle (formerly iZettle) for in-person payments, which works well in retail settings but feels disconnected from the PayPal online experience. It is a separate product with a separate interface and a separate settlement process.
EEZYPAY supports on-site payment collection through mobile devices, allowing field technicians and service professionals to collect payment at the job site via card tap, chip, or manual entry. The collected payment links directly to the service record in EEZYCRM, the time tracked in EEZYCLOCK, and the invoice in EEZYBOOKS. Your technician collects payment, and by the time they drive to the next job, the customer record is updated, the invoice is marked paid, and the revenue is recorded in your books.
We will not pretend our hardware ecosystem competes with Square’s. It does not. But for service businesses where payment collection happens at the customer’s location rather than at a retail counter, the connected workflow matters more than having the prettiest card reader.
PCI-DSS compliance is mandatory for every business that processes credit card payments. The penalties for non-compliance range from $5,000 to $100,000 per month, and a data breach involving card data can destroy a small business financially and reputationally.
Square handles PCI compliance for merchants using their hardware and software, which is one of their genuine strengths. If you process payments exclusively through Square’s ecosystem, your PCI compliance burden is minimal.
Stripe provides PCI compliance at the SAQ-A level for businesses using Stripe Elements or Checkout, meaning card data never touches your servers. This is the gold standard for online payment security, and Stripe implements it well. However, maintaining compliance requires that your integration is configured correctly, which loops back to the “you need a developer” problem.
PayPal handles PCI compliance for transactions processed through their platform, but the moment you use PayPal’s API to build a custom integration, the compliance responsibility shifts partially to you.
EEZYPAY operates at SAQ-A compliance level with full tokenization. No raw card data ever touches your systems, your servers, or your employees’ devices. Card data is tokenized at the point of entry, whether that is online checkout, a mobile device at a job site, or a payment link in an emailed invoice. The tokens are useless outside of EEZYPAY’s processing environment, which means a breach of your systems does not expose card data because card data was never there.
We handle PCI compliance auditing, vulnerability scanning, and security updates. You do not need to fill out self-assessment questionnaires, hire a QSA, or worry about whether your website’s SSL certificate is configured correctly. Process payments through EEZYPAY, and your PCI compliance is handled.
This is where EEZYPAY fundamentally departs from Square, Stripe, and PayPal. Those platforms process payments. Full stop. They are very good at processing payments. But the payment is one step in a longer business process, and when the payment processor is disconnected from the rest of your operations, every other step requires manual intervention.
EEZYPAY is the payment layer of the EEZY ecosystem. That means:
A customer pays an invoice, and the payment flows to EEZYBOOKS for automatic reconciliation. The customer record in EEZYCRM updates to reflect the payment. If the payment was for a service visit, the job in EEZYCLOCK is marked as billed and paid. If the customer has a recurring service agreement, the next billing cycle is scheduled automatically.
None of this requires middleware, Zapier workflows, API connectors, or manual data entry. The payment is the trigger that updates every downstream system because those systems are all part of the same platform.
For small businesses processing payments through Square while managing customers in a separate CRM, tracking time in a separate app, and doing books in a separate accounting system, the integration cost of connecting all those systems exceeds the cost of the tools themselves. EEZYPAY eliminates that integration cost by being part of an ecosystem where the connections already exist.
Square is the best choice for retail businesses with a physical point of sale. Their hardware, their in-store experience, and their ecosystem of retail tools are genuinely excellent. If you have a counter, a register, and walk-in customers, Square is hard to beat.
Stripe is the best choice for technology companies and online businesses with developer resources. Their API is the most flexible, their documentation is the most thorough, and their feature set for complex payment workflows is unmatched. If you have developers who can build and maintain a custom integration, Stripe offers maximum control.
PayPal is the safe choice for businesses that want the broadest buyer recognition. Every online shopper knows PayPal, and offering PayPal as a checkout option can increase conversion rates simply because customers trust the name.
EEZYPAY is the right choice for service businesses and SMBs that need payment processing to connect to their accounting, CRM, and operations without building custom integrations. If your biggest payment headache is reconciliation, not transaction processing, EEZYPAY solves the problem that the standalone processors ignore.
Yes. Many businesses use EEZYPAY for invoiced and on-site payments while maintaining Square for walk-in retail transactions. The key advantage is that EEZYPAY transactions reconcile automatically with your EEZYBOOKS accounting. Transactions from other processors will still require manual reconciliation, but you can reduce that burden by routing as many transactions as possible through EEZYPAY.
EEZYPAY accepts all major credit and debit cards including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. We support card-present transactions via tap and chip, card-not-present transactions via online checkout and payment links, and ACH bank transfers for larger invoices where card processing fees would be significant.
Standard settlement is next business day for established accounts. New accounts may have a brief initial review period, after which next-day settlement applies. We do not hold funds based on arbitrary risk algorithms or volume spikes. If you process a large transaction, we may verify it with you directly rather than silently holding the funds for weeks.
EEZYPAY provides dispute management tools that compile transaction evidence, including signed service records, time-stamped job completions from EEZYCLOCK, and customer communication logs from EEZYCRM, into a dispute response package. This connected evidence significantly improves dispute resolution outcomes compared to providing transaction data alone.
Stop reconciling deposits against invoices by hand. EEZYPAY connects payment collection to your books, your CRM, and your operations automatically. Process payments and move on to the work that actually matters.
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