FAQ
Payments Diagnostic, answered.
What it is, what you send, what it costs, and how the work runs.
What is a Payments Diagnostic?
A paid, four-file review that grades your payments program and sizes the money on the table in about one week. You send residual reports, your contract’s Schedule A, transaction data, and merchant statements; Straata reconciles them into a graded Report Card, with no integration or system access required.
What if nothing is wrong?
Then you keep a clean, graded answer you can hand to your board or a diligence team, and we name what would make the next read stronger. A clean grade is a real deliverable.
Why start with the Report Card?
It establishes the evidence before any execution scope is proposed. If the card shows nothing material, you still keep the finding and know what was checked.
What data do you need, exactly?
Four files: residual reports, your contract’s Schedule A, transaction data with card type, and merchant statements. A few months of each is enough. Missing one narrows the read, and we tell you what the gap prevents us from proving.
Is our data secure?
We never touch cardholder data. No full card numbers, no CVV; PCI DSS is out of scope by architecture. Files live in a SOC 2 backed cloud environment, AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, under a data and security agreement signed before anything moves.
How long does it take?
About one week from files received to Report Card. Deeper readouts and the paid work that follows run in weeks, never quarters.
We already have a payments team. Is this still useful?
Yes. Internal owners use the Report Card as an independent benchmark and as leverage before a renewal, a negotiation, or a board conversation. The diagnostic machinery is the part almost no internal team has time to build.
What happens if our payments lead leaves?
Nothing walks out the door. Straata keeps a living record of your payments program: the vendor terms, the economics, the benchmarks, and the reasoning behind each decision. So the next owner, your new hire or a fractional operator from us, picks up mid-stream instead of starting from zero.
What does the paid work cost?
It is scoped around what the Report Card finds, which is why we do not publish a rate card. Recovery work can be priced on what is actually recovered, so the incentive stays aligned.
How is a Residual Audit different from optimization?
A Residual Audit recovers money you are already owed, reconciled to your contract to the cent. Optimization sizes future margin: pricing, interchange qualification, contract terms, and product. The Report Card sizes both, on separate lines, and never blends recovered dollars with modeled ones.
Where does the platform fit?
The platform is the amplifier: normalized data, benchmark logic, and agentic execution under a named payments operator. You experience it through the Report Card and the work.