The audit large corporations run in-house
Every large company employs someone to verify that its vendors charged what they agreed to charge. That single position is the reason those overcharges get caught. DEKALOS performs the same review on your accounts, documents the arithmetic behind every figure, and provides the precise wording required to recover the money.
The audit costs you nothing. If we find nothing, you pay nothing.
The problem
Vendor overcharging rarely announces itself. There is no single alarming line item. Instead there is a modest excess on one charge, an additional fraction of a percentage point of markup on another, and a fee whose official-sounding name conceals the absence of any underlying requirement. It recurs every month, inside a document written to be filed rather than read, and it compounds for years.
This is a question of time, not of diligence. Reconciling a nine-page processing statement against current card network rules is specialist work, and specialist work has always meant a retainer. That is precisely why the charge goes unchallenged.
The traditional firms in this field are franchise networks of human analysts. Their cost per audit is a person's billable hours, which is exactly why they only pursue accounts large enough to cover those hours, and why their knowledge never accumulates from one client to the next.
DEKALOS automates the first pass and keeps every finding as structured data. Each statement we read makes the next one more accurate. That is the difference, and it is the reason we can look at accounts a franchise analyst cannot profitably touch.
A worked example
A card sale divides three ways. Interchange goes to the customer's bank. Assessments go to Visa or Mastercard. Neither is negotiable. The third component is the processor's own markup, and that is where overcharges occur, alongside fees presented as network requirements that are not.
| Card volume | $80,000.00 |
|---|---|
| Total fees charged | $2,800.00 |
| Effective rate (fees ÷ volume) | 3.50% |
| Benchmark, restaurant / card present | 2.30% |
| Probable overcharge, monthly | $960.00 |
| Probable overcharge, annualised | $11,520.00 |
These are estimates based on the statement provided and on benchmark rates for this type of business. We recommend confirming each item with your processor before acting on it. We will never tell you that you are owed a number we cannot show you the working for.
What it costs
The audit is always free. Our fee is a share of what you actually save, calculated on twelve months of the monthly saving and invoiced a single time, once a follow-up statement has confirmed your new rate. Each finding is billed once, on a verified figure. We never take a continuing percentage of a saving after that invoice is settled.
Recommended
$99 / month
Success fee 20% of 12 months of savings
$0 up front
Success fee 35% of 12 months of savings
| Year one | One-off audit | Monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| Success fee | $4,032.00 | $2,304.00 |
| Subscription | — | $1,188.00 |
| Total to DEKALOS | $4,032.00 | $3,492.00 |
| Referral credits, if three referrals sign see below | −$1,188.00 | −$1,188.00 |
| Total to DEKALOS after credits | $2,844.00 | $2,304.00 |
| Your share of the $11,520 saved | $8,676.00 | $9,216.00 |
Without any referrals those last two rows read $4,032.00 and $3,492.00 to DEKALOS, leaving you $7,488.00 or $8,028.00. The credits are earned, not assumed.
On these figures, monitoring costs $540 less in the first year. After that the subscription continues at $99 a month, and every further finding is charged at 20% rather than 35%. What you are buying is the second look: processor markup tends to drift upward over time, and an account nobody re-checks is priced correctly once and then slowly stops being. We do not offer a trial period; the reduced fee is the incentive.
How we work
DEKALOS never contacts your processor, carrier, insurer or utility. You do, and you do so holding the finding, the arithmetic supporting it, the wording to send, the quote to request, and guidance on recognising the same arrangement offered back to you under a different name.
This is deliberate. It keeps you in control of your own vendor relationships, it keeps our costs low enough that we can take on accounts the franchise firms turn away, and it means nobody is signing anything on your behalf.
AI is used to read figures from a document and never to determine a finding. Every calculation is performed by deterministic code, so the same statement produces the same result indefinitely and any figure we send you can be verified by hand.
Extracted line items must sum to the total printed on your statement. Where they do not, something has been misread, and the statement is held without any finding being issued. A figure we cannot reconcile never reaches you.
Markup within the fair range for your business type is left alone. Charges we cannot identify with confidence are listed for review and excluded from every total. Genuine card network pass-through costs are never presented as recoverable.
An unfamiliar fee label, a statement format we have not encountered, an equipment lease, a blended rate: each is reviewed by a person before it reaches you. Previously confirmed patterns clear automatically. Novel ones never do.
An overcharge we fail to identify costs a single opportunity. A finding that collapses under scrutiny from your processor costs your confidence in everything else we report. Given that choice, we withhold.
What we audit
Cost recovery is conventionally sold one category at a time: a processing specialist, an energy consultant, another firm for freight. Each with a separate contract and a separate share of the savings. We review every category under one engagement, which also means a saving too small to be worth chasing on its own still counts when it sits alongside the others.
Markup above the fair band, unwarranted fees carrying official-sounding names, and transactions misclassified into more expensive tiers.
Available now
A rate schedule mismatched to how you actually draw power, and demand billed on a peak your meter has not reached in months.
Available now
Carriers invoicing above your contracted rate, duplicated accessorial charges, and reweighs that are never audited.
In development
Licences billed monthly against accounts nobody signs into, and overlapping tools performing a single function twice.
In development
Workers' compensation classification is the fifth category on our roadmap and is not currently offered. Insurance is regulated state by state, and we will not enter that category until the position is formally established.
Request a review
No contract to begin and nothing to pay. Send us a recent merchant processing statement, a commercial electricity bill, or both, and you will receive either a set of findings with the arithmetic supporting each one, or a direct answer that your pricing sits within the fair range and there is nothing to invoice.
Send both if you have them. Reviewing two categories together often clears a threshold that neither would on its own.
We are the strongest fit for accounts processing roughly $5,000 to $50,000 a month in card volume.
We do not request portal logins or account credentials, and we decline them if offered. Statements reach us only because you send them.