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Payers increasingly reimburse clinics by virtual card instead of check or ACH: a single-use card number printed on the remittance advice that you’re expected to key into a terminal yourself. Lemma does that for you: we detect the card in your lockbox mail, charge it, and deposit the money into your account as itemized transactions.

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How a card payment happens

There are two ways to process a credit card payment on Lemma.

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1. Lockbox payments

1

The payer mails a virtual card

A payer sends an explanation of benefits with a virtual card on it, or a standalone virtual card, to your lockbox address.
2

Lemma detects the card

We scan and classify every piece of lockbox mail. When a document carries a virtual card, we extract the card details and the amount to charge.
3

Lemma runs the card

We charge the card on your behalf. Nothing is required from you — there’s no terminal to key the number into and no portal to log into.
4

The money lands in your account

Once the payment settles, the funds are deposited into your account and the payment appears on your Transactions page.

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2. Manual payments

Charge a card yourself on the Lemma dashboard when the card doesn’t come through your lockbox. Use it for:
  • Payer virtual cards you receive in a payer portal, by fax, or over the phone
  • Patient cards your front desk collects over the phone, such as for a balance or a copay

Charge a card

Requirements and step-by-step instructions for charging a card from Move money.

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Tracking a card payment

Each card payment carries a status you can follow from the mail item in your lockbox:

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Payments and fees are separate transactions

Every card payment produces two transactions:
  • The card payment, as an Acquiring transaction — the gross amount charged to the card.
  • The processing fee, as a Fee transaction — what it cost to process that payment.
Splitting them is deliberate. A typical processor sends one lump-sum ACH every day or two and leaves your billing team to work out which payments and which fees it covers. Because Lemma is also your bank, we drop a labeled line item straight into the account for every economic event instead, so the reconciliation is already done when you open the page. Refunds and chargebacks follow the same rule: each gets its own transaction, and each carries its own fee.
On the Transactions page, filter by the Acquiring type to see the payments you collected and by the Fee type to see what they cost. Combined with a date range, that makes month-end reconciliation of card revenue against processing fees straightforward.

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