The AIME Blog
Vendor fees, audited in the open.
Practical, number-first guides to what your vendors actually charge: how to read the statements, benchmark every line, and recover the margin that drifted away. Written by the team behind AIME.
PayrollThe Payroll Invoice Nobody Reads
Payroll is quoted as one number and billed as a dozen. How to work out what you actually pay per employee per month, and where the gap between that and your contract comes from.
UtilitiesYour Utility Bill Is Two Bills
Supply and delivery fail in completely different ways. How to find an expired supply contract, a wrong rate class, and a demand ratchet still charging you for one bad afternoon.
FacilitiesThe Standing Order: Auditing Linen, Janitorial and Food Invoices
The invoices that arrive twice a week are the least reviewed spend in most businesses. How to audit a delivery ticket against a price file, and why the control point is the back door.
InsuranceThe Premium Audit: Where Commercial Insurance Billing Goes Wrong
Your premium is not a price, it is a calculation run on your own data. Class codes, the experience mod, the payroll basis and the fees underneath, and how to check each one.
ProductHow AIME Reads a Statement: From a Photograph to a Line-Item Ledger
What actually happens between dropping a PDF into AIME and getting a savings report: text extraction, page-image vision for scans, line reconciliation, and the checks that flag a misread before you see it.
RestaurantsWhat Restaurants Actually Pay to Take a Card
Tip adjustments, small tickets, delivery marketplaces and all-in-one POS pricing. Why restaurant effective rates run high, which parts are structural, and which parts are just markup.
Card processingInterchange, Explained: Where Your 2.9% Actually Goes
Interchange, assessments and markup are three different things with three different owners. What each one is, who keeps it, which parts you can move, and how downgrades quietly raise your rate.
ProductInside the Benchmarking Engine: How AIME Decides a Fee Is Too High
A fee is not high because it feels high. How AIME benchmarks each line against a fair-market band, separates pass-through cost from markup, and calculates what is genuinely recoverable.
EcommerceThe Ecommerce Payment Cost Stack: Gateway, Processor, Fraud and Chargebacks
Online sellers pay four vendors to take one payment. How to separate gateway, processor, fraud tooling and dispute costs, and where the duplicated charges usually sit.
Card processingLevel 2 and Level 3 Data: The B2B Discount Most Merchants Never Claim
Commercial cards qualify for lower interchange when you send more data with the transaction. What Level 2 and Level 3 require, what they are worth, and why most B2B merchants send neither.
HealthcarePayment Fees in Medical and Dental Practices
Practices pay card fees on patient balances, HSA and FSA cards, payment plans and virtual credit card remittances from insurers. Where the cost concentrates and what a practice can actually change.
ComplianceSurcharging, Cash Discount and Dual Pricing: What Is Actually Allowed
Three ways to pass card costs to the customer, three different rule sets. What the card networks require, where states differ, and why the program you were sold may not be the one you are running.
ProductContract vs. Statement: The Comparison Nobody Has Time to Do
Your merchant agreement says one thing and your statement charges another. How to run a contract-to-invoice comparison, what drift looks like in practice, and why rounding is where money hides.
NonprofitsDonation Processing: What Nonprofits Hand Back to Their Processor
Charity interchange rates exist and many nonprofits are not on them. Platform fees, recurring gift failures and the true cost of a donate button, benchmarked line by line.
SoftwareThe SaaS Spend Audit: Seats, Shelfware and the Renewal Ratchet
Software is now a top-three line item for most businesses and almost nobody audits it. How to count real usage, find duplicate tools, and stop an auto-renewal escalator compounding for five years.
ProductContinuous Monitoring: Why a Fee Audit Has to Be a Subscription, Not an Event
Fixed fees do not stay fixed. Why one-off vendor fee audits decay within months, what a monitoring loop checks each cycle, and how to keep a negotiated rate negotiated.
Card processingHow to Audit Your Merchant Services Statement, Line by Line
A practical, line-by-line guide to auditing your merchant services statement: effective rate, interchange, markup, and the junk fees to challenge.
Card processingThe Junk Fees Hiding on Your Processing Statement
PCI non-compliance, batch fees, statement fees, regulatory surcharges: the complete field guide to processing junk fees, what they should cost, and how to remove them.
BenchmarksWhat Is a Good Effective Rate for Card Processing?
Effective rate benchmarks by business type: what card processing should cost in-store, online and B2B, how to calculate yours, and when the number means you are overpaying.
BankingThe Bank Fee Audit: What Your Treasury Statement Isn't Telling You
How to audit bank depository and treasury fees: reading the account analysis statement, earnings credit rates, per-item charges, and the fees banks waive when asked.
Vendor managementVendor Fee Creep: Why Your Contracted Rates Quietly Rise Every Year
Fee creep is the slow drift between the price you negotiated and the price you pay. How it works across processing, banking, freight and software, and how to stop it.
FreightFreight and Parcel Invoice Audits: Where the Refunds Hide
Late deliveries, wrong accessorials, dimensional-weight errors and lapsed discounts: where the money hides on carrier invoices, and how a parcel audit recovers it.
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