For years, integration companies faced a real tradeoff at checkout: accept credit cards and get paid fast, or accept ACH and save on fees but wait days for the money to actually land in the bank. That tradeoff has quietly disappeared. With the launch of Accelerated ACH Deposits in D-Tools Cloud Release #100, ACH payments now settle nearly as fast as credit cards, which means the one real argument integrators had for defaulting to plastic no longer holds up.
ACH (Automated Clearing House) has been around since the late 1960s, when the Federal Reserve built it to send “digital checks” between banks. That bank-to-bank handoff has always taken time: while a credit card is approved in milliseconds, an ACH transfer has historically taken two to three days to approve, with funds not actually landing until the fifth business day. An integrator might not even find out a transfer failed until four days after it was initiated.
That lag was reason enough for a lot of integration companies to lean on credit cards, fees and all, simply to keep cash moving. As Adam Holden, Head of Payments at D-Tools, puts it, “It doesn’t matter how you want to be paid… it matters how your customer wants to pay you. Integrators should not be dictating to the clients how to pay them. The cost of doing business is the cost of doing business. You want your money from any avenue you possibly can, or you risk losing business with specific clients.”
The problem was that giving clients the ACH option they often preferred meant integrators absorbed a cash-flow delay to get it.
D-Tools Cloud Release #100 attacks that delay directly with Accelerated ACH Deposits, a new next-day funding option built into D-Tools Payments. Once an integrator enables it and a client’s ACH payment is verified, funds arrive in one business day instead of four, closing the gap with credit-card settlement speed. It’s a global account setting, complete with confirmation dialogs and invoice status badges so integrators always know exactly where a payment stands, and it carries a processing fee of 0.8%. There is no cap on the transaction amount.
In practical terms, this eliminates the last real reason to steer customers toward credit cards. Integrators can now offer ACH as the default payment method, which is the option many clients already prefer, without sacrificing the immediate cash flow that used to be credit cards’ one advantage.
Even before factoring in speed, ACH has always been the cheaper way to get paid. D-Tools Payments still charges just 1% for standard ACH transfers with a four-day funding, with the ACH fee capped at $25. Credit card merchant processing, by comparison, typically runs 2.75% to 4% depending on card type and volume. Even with the 0.8% fee for next-day funding, ACH remains meaningfully cheaper than a credit card on most transactions… now with none of the wait.
Integrators are already voting with their invoices. In 2024, data from D-Tools Payments shows clients paid via ACH at twice the frequency of credit cards — 67% of payments processed via ACH versus 33% via credit card — and the average ACH payment was more than double the average credit card payment (over $5,900 on average). That’s exactly where the fee savings matter most: on an integrator’s largest invoices. ACH is also carrying the full weight of the business, covering deposits, progress payments, and service charges alike.
Michael Moore, managing partner at SimpleHome LLC in Birmingham, AL, put this shift into practice. After adopting D-Tools Payments, Moore set ACH as the default payment method for his clients, and the results were immediate. Clients began paying via ACH more often than before, simply because it was the path of least resistance, which eliminated the credit-card merchant fees Moore had previously been absorbing on those transactions.
“Having a more streamlined process with D-Tools Cloud Payments, we are getting our money faster… sometimes days, sometimes weeks. It is making a difference,” Moore says.
Beyond the fee savings, Moore says the entire payment experience became simpler for everyone involved. Instead of a clunky, disconnected process in QuickBooks Online, which involved a second email, a separate login, a client left to connect the dots between a proposal and an invoice, payment requests in D-Tools Cloud now appear immediately after a client accepts a proposal, in the same communication.
“They understand that they have accepted the proposal… now it’s time to pay. So, we are excited about the expedited process and the more natural progression of the project than the process we had to follow in the past,” Moore adds.
The net effect for SimpleHome: less time spent chasing checks and building invoices, lower processing costs, and money that arrives faster all from simply making ACH the default.
Credit cards used to win on speed and ACH used to win on cost. With Accelerated ACH Deposits, integrators no longer have to choose. Next-day funding closes the cash-flow gap that once justified steering clients toward higher-cost credit cards, while ACH’s lower fees keep more of every payment in the business. Integrators like Michael Moore at SimpleHome LLC are already proving the model: make ACH the default, let credit cards be the exception, and keep more of what clients pay — without waiting longer to get it.