Answers for dental practices.

What are dental merchant services?

Dental merchant services are the account, terminal, and support a dental practice uses to accept patient cards. Summit Payments provides them to dental practices nationwide: credit card acceptance, compliant surcharging, and payments posted into Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, DSN, and PracticeWorks.

Questions? Call 720-603-9126.

What is dental payment processing?

Dental payment processing is how a practice turns a patient card payment into a deposit and a posted ledger entry. Summit Payments does that for dental offices nationwide. Summit Health Pay posts each payment into the practice management system, and Summit Health Pay and Summit Cloud POS send receipts by text or email.

There's no printing at the front desk. See integrations and dental payment processing.

What is dental credit card processing?

Dental credit card processing is the part of payment processing that handles credit cards. A credit card payment can carry a disclosed surcharge. A debit card cannot, and Summit never surcharges debit. The terminal reads the card type and drops the fee on its own, so nobody at the front desk decides.

Some patients happily switch to debit. See surcharging compliance for the rules.

What do credit card fees cost dentists?

Credit card fees are what the practice pays the processor when a patient pays by credit card. On $50,000 in monthly card volume at a 3% effective rate, that is about $1,500 a month before any surcharge program. That figure is illustrative.

Debit stays a practice cost. Practices like yours save ten to fifteen thousand a year, $10,000-plus. The highest-volume practices have kept $20,000 or more a year. Summit shows the real number from the practice's own statement. Run your volume on the savings analysis.

What is dental surcharging?

Dental surcharging adds a disclosed fee to a credit card payment so the practice does not absorb that cost. The patient sees the fee before paying, and the receipt lists it on its own line. A $100 treatment with a $3 fee shows $103. Debit is never surcharged.

Surcharge rules vary by state, and a few states limit or don't allow it. We check your state's rules before setup. Summit handles disclosure signage, receipt formatting, and card brand notification. Summit does not handle state registration. The longer guide is surcharging compliance.

Can every practice add the 3% credit card fee?

Surcharge rules vary by state, and a few states limit or don't allow it.

We check your state's rules before setup and set up your signs and receipts to match. Debit cards are never charged extra. Colorado practices can add a credit card surcharge of up to 3% under the merchant discount rate option in C.R.S. 5-2-212(1)(c)(II). Check your state in the state rules checker.

Colorado: C.R.S. 5-2-212 as amended by SB21-091

Does Summit work outside Colorado?

Yes. Summit Payments serves dental practices nationwide.

Setup is remote nationwide, with in-person setup where available. Surcharge rules vary by state, so we check your state's rules before setup. See the state rules checker.

What does Summit charge?

A 3% surcharge on credit card payments, so the practice pays nothing for credit card processing.

Debit is never surcharged. Debit is quoted per practice after a free statement review. Equipment: no charge, and it remains Summit property. Send a statement on the statement page to get your quote.

Do Summit receipts have to be printed?

No. Summit Health Pay and Summit Cloud POS send receipts by text or email, so there's no printing at the front desk. The patient chooses text, email, print, or no receipt on the terminal screen. Nothing is handed across the counter unless the patient asks for a printed copy.

Receipts are formatted to show the base charge, the credit card fee, and the total.