How healthy is your payments setup? Get your free Payments Health Score

Most software platforms find out their payments setup is underperforming the same way. A merchant calls because a deposit did not land, somebody goes digging, and three unrelated problems fall out of the drawer at once. The pricing has drifted. Half the merchant base never turned payments on. Nobody can say with confidence who is responsible for the PCI answer when an enterprise buyer asks.

None of that is negligence. Payments is one of the few parts of a software business that nobody quite owns. Finance sees the deposits, support sees the complaints, product sees the onboarding funnel, and no one sees the whole thing at once. So it drifts, quietly, for years.

We built the Payments Health Score because the first useful step is almost always a straight inventory of what you have. It is free, it runs to seven questions and about sixty seconds, and it scores the six things that decide what payments are earning you. The average platform comes out at 68 out of 100, which sits in the at-risk band rather than the comfortable one.

The six things it scores, and what each one is worth

Approval rate, 25 points. The share of payment attempts that succeed. It carries more weight than anything else because a decline that should have been an approval is revenue that existed, got attempted, and disappeared without landing on a report as a loss. Most platforms have never seen the number.

Revenue recovery, 20 points. What happens after a payment fails. Automatic retries recover a real slice of failures on their own. Manual follow-up recovers less and costs somebody a week. Nothing at all is the common answer.

Cost efficiency, 18 points. Whether you can describe what you and your merchants pay once you get past the headline rate. Blended and tiered pricing is built to be hard to read, which is why so many platforms cannot answer this about their own book.

Integration depth, 15 points. Whether payments happen inside your product or somewhere adjacent to it. Hosted checkout pages and redirects both work. They also both cost you signups at the seam, and the cost is invisible unless you go looking.

Portfolio visibility, 12 points. Whether you can see performance merchant by merchant, only in aggregate, or only when a processor statement turns up.

Ownership and control, 10 points. Who sets the merchant rate, who keeps the spread, and who the merchant calls when a deposit is late.

The seventh question asks roughly what volume you process in a year. That one is not scored. It is what turns the six answers into a dollar range for what the gaps are costing you.

What you get back

A score out of 100, your position on each of the six, an estimated annual revenue at risk, and the methodology so you can argue with the weighting. Below 55 is active leakage. 55 to 69 is at risk. 70 to 84 means the gaps are known and fixable. Above 85 and payments is pulling real weight for the business. No sales call attached. Plenty of people run it, see that four out of six are fine, fix the two that are not, and we never hear from them. That is a good outcome.

The reason we ask for a minute rather than twenty is that a rough read you actually finish beats a thorough audit you abandon. If the score turns up something that needs a real conversation, that conversation will be better for having the inventory in hand.

One thing worth saying plainly

A lot of platforms hold off on this because they assume the answer is a rip-and-replace project. It usually is not. Of the six, two are commercial terms, two are product decisions, and two are things you have to measure before you can fix anything. Those are separable. Knowing which ones are in play is most of the value.

Run your Payments Health Score at valpay.com/payments-health-score. Seven questions, about sixty seconds, and the full breakdown lands in your inbox. If the result raises something you want a second opinion on, send me a note and we can compare what you are seeing against what we see across our portfolio.