1. Is it risky to accept checks as I know some people refuse to pay with a credit card?

It is very important that you should accept checks as a form of payment as you will be able to serve those customers who don't have a credit card or who are over limit. This adds an extra avenue of increasing your sales. There are extra services you can have with accepting checks see below for more details.

A service you will want to check out is check guarantee. What Check Guarantee does is it will pay you back any money if a customer writes you a check and it for some reason bounces. You will be able to enter information into your terminal or online software and it will look up the check writer, usually their driver licence number. Check Gurantee checks a large database of bad check writers and it processes this information instantaneously.

If the check writer has had a bad history with writing checks in the past it will decline the transaction and advise you to not accept the check. Then you should ask the customer for a different kind of payment option.

Check Gurantee costs about 1 - 3% of the sale. If you recieve an approval code eventhough the customer was declined doesn't mean there is money in the checking account. It just means the check writer doe snot have a history of writing bad checks.

The other option you may want to consider is Check Verification. The difference between Check verification and check gurantee is that verification will check to see if the person has a bad history of writing checks but it will not reimburse you if a check bounces like Check Guarantee will. This service only costs less then 50 cents per tansaction. So you pay less but take on more risk.

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