Reconciling PACE, GreenSky, and Service Finance Fees to Campaign Margin

PACE charges 5 to 6 percent in closing fees. GreenSky merchant fees run 5 to 10 percent of the loan amount. Service Finance and Synchrony can reach 12 percent on deferred-interest plans. None of it shows up in your ad dashboard. Here is how to reconcile financing fees back to campaign-level margin in home services — and why the contractors who do it outperform the ones who don't.

Home services is one of the few verticals where financing is not optional. In categories like impact windows, full-roof replacements, HVAC system installs, solar, and bathroom remodels, 60 to 70 percent of jobs are financed. The contractor offers the customer payment plans through a finance partner — PACE, GreenSky, Service Finance, Synchrony — and the customer signs up at the point of sale.

What most contractors don't model, and what no ad platform reports, is that every financed job has a merchant fee deducted before the contractor sees the money. The customer borrows $10,000. The finance partner takes 5 to 10 percent off the top. The contractor receives $9,000 to $9,500. The difference — $500 to $1,000 — never appears in Google Ads, Meta, HubSpot, Salesforce, or any attribution platform. It sits in the finance partner's payout statements, attributed to no campaign.

For a roofing company doing $4 million in annual revenue at 65 percent financed volume with a blended 7 percent merchant fee, that gap is approximately $182,000 per year in cost the dashboard never accounted for. Allocated across the campaigns that produced those jobs, it changes which campaigns are actually profitable and which are not.

This piece walks through each major finance program, the actual fee structure, how the fees attribute back to campaigns, and what the reconciliation looks like for a typical home services operation. We covered the broader margin compression issue in our analysis of how financing fees are quietly eating home services margin. This is the technical deep dive on the math.

The Programs and What They Actually Charge in Merchant Fees

Four financing programs dominate home services. Each has a different fee structure, a different way of taking its cut, and a different way the math hits contractor margin.

PACE Financing (Property Assessed Clean Energy)

PACE is structured differently from traditional consumer financing. The loan is repaid through the homeowner's property tax bill, secured by a lien on the property. Common eligible improvements include solar, HVAC, impact windows, roofing, and energy-efficiency upgrades.

According to Renew Financial documentation, PACE financing carries closing fees of 5 to 6 percent of the loan amount, plus an annual administration fee of approximately $35 for the life of the loan — typically a 20-year term. Interest rates to homeowners range from 3.69 percent to 8.49 percent depending on provider and creditworthiness. The closing fee is typically paid by the contractor or built into the project price.

For a $25,000 PACE-financed roof, that means $1,250 to $1,500 in closing fees attributed to the originating lead. If that lead came from a Meta campaign showing a $65 dashboard CPL, the real campaign cost includes the $1,250 fee allocated against the conversion. The dashboard reflects $65. The campaign actually cost $65 plus the per-conversion share of $1,250 — not a small adjustment.

GreenSky

GreenSky is one of the most widely-used home improvement financing platforms, with merchant fees that vary significantly by loan type and promotional terms. Per GreenSky merchant documentation, standard merchant fees run 5 to 10 percent of the loan amount — typically 7 to 10 percent on smaller loans, closer to 5 percent on larger loans. Some loan types include a one-time $39 activation fee. Deferred-interest promotional plans carry higher merchant fees because the contractor subsidizes the promotional period.

The mechanics are clean: the loan is approved, the contractor delivers the work, and the contractor receives the loan amount minus the merchant fee. A $10,000 loan at a 7 percent merchant fee pays out as $9,300 to the contractor. The $700 disappears into the finance partner's books, with no native connection back to the marketing campaign that produced the lead.

Service Finance and Synchrony

Service Finance Company and Synchrony Bank operate similarly to GreenSky for home improvement merchant financing. Industry standard fee ranges run 6 to 12 percent of the transaction amount, with the higher end of the range applied to longer deferred-interest promotional periods. A 12-month no-interest promotion typically costs the contractor 8 to 10 percent in merchant fees. An 18- or 24-month promotion can push the fee to 12 percent or higher.

The pattern is consistent across all three programs: the customer gets favorable financing terms, the contractor absorbs the fee, and the fee is invisible to the marketing reporting layer.

Side by Side: Merchant Fees Across Programs

Industry data on average home improvement loan size puts the typical financed project at $19,653 as of March 2026. At a blended 7 percent merchant fee, the average financed job carries roughly $1,376 in merchant fees that the marketing dashboard never sees.

Every financed job has a fee deducted before the contractor sees the money. None of it shows up in any ad platform, attribution tool, or marketing CRM.

Why Dashboards Cannot Show Merchant Fees

The architectural reason is simple: financing fees live in a system the ad platforms have no connection to. The finance partner — GreenSky, PACE, Service Finance — maintains its own merchant portal showing approved loans, fees deducted, and net payouts. That data does not flow into Google Ads, Meta Ads, HubSpot, or Salesforce. There is no native integration. There is no UTM parameter that survives a 12-month financing transaction. There is no campaign ID attached to the merchant payout statement.

The result is that the dashboards report on the cost layer they can see (media spend) and the conversion event they can see (the lead, sometimes the closed deal), but they do not reconcile the merchant fee that ate $700 to $1,500 out of every financed job back to the campaign that produced the lead.

This is one of seven structural gaps between dashboard reporting and true contribution margin. We covered the full architecture in our seven cost layers breakdown and the dashboard distortion problem in our True CAC analysis. Financing fees are one of the largest layers in home services specifically because of the financing penetration rate — when 60 to 70 percent of jobs are financed, the fee layer compounds across nearly every campaign.

What the Reconciliation Actually Looks Like

Reconciling financing fees back to campaign-level margin requires connecting four data flows that natively do not connect:

1. The lead event. Time-stamped, campaign-attributed, source-attributed. Lives in the ad platform and the CRM.

2. The closed deal. Tied back to the originating lead through CRM relationships. Includes revenue, financing flag, finance partner used, loan amount.

3. The finance partner payout. Lives in the merchant portal of GreenSky, Service Finance, PACE, or Synchrony. Shows loan amount, merchant fee deducted, net payout. Typically exported via CSV or merchant API.

4. The campaign attribution. The link back from the closed deal through the lead event to the originating campaign and ad spend.

None of these four data flows are joined natively in any major marketing platform. The reconciliation has to happen manually, in a spreadsheet, by an analyst who pulls four exports and joins them on lead identifiers — or by a system built specifically to do this reconciliation automatically.

What Happens When You Do the Reconciliation

The numbers move. Sometimes substantially.

Consider a $50,000 monthly Meta spend for a Florida impact window company. The dashboard shows 320 leads at $156 CPL. Close rate runs 18 percent — so 58 closed deals. Average job size $18,500. Total revenue $1,073,000.

By dashboard math, the campaign produces a $156 CPL on a vertical where job-level margins look healthy. Scale the campaign. Take more market share.

By reconciled math: 65 percent of those 58 closed deals are financed through GreenSky and Service Finance. That's 38 financed jobs at an average of $18,500, or $703,000 in financed revenue. At a blended 8 percent merchant fee (mix of standard and deferred-interest), that's $56,240 in financing fees deducted before the contractor sees the money. Allocated back to the originating campaign, that's an additional $97 per closed deal in fee cost — and an additional $176 per lead when distributed across the 320 leads that produced those closes.

The dashboard reports $156 CPL. The reconciled cost-per-lead, with financing fees alone allocated back, is closer to $332. That's before platform fees, refunds, chargebacks, and compliance costs enter the picture. Once all seven layers are reconciled, the typical home services campaign runs 30 to 70 percent above dashboard CPL — consistent with what we've documented in our validation case study across real businesses.

What Changes When the Reconciliation Is Automated

Three things shift when financing fees are reconciled back to campaigns nightly instead of quarterly or never.

Campaign-level scale and cut decisions change. Campaigns that drove a high financing-rate mix look less profitable than dashboard reporting suggests. Campaigns that drove a lower financing-rate mix — typically cash-pay customers or larger contracts that didn't need financing — look better. The reallocation usually shifts budget toward channels and creative that produce a higher cash-pay mix.

Finance partner negotiation has data behind it. When merchant fee data is attributed back to campaigns, the contractor can see exactly how much margin is going to each finance partner across the customer mix. That data becomes leverage for renegotiating merchant fee rates. Most contractors discover they are paying the highest tier of fees on volume that would qualify for the lowest tier with a structured contract review.

Promotional financing offers get costed correctly. Deferred-interest "12 months same as cash" promotions look like marketing wins because they accelerate close rates. They are also the most expensive merchant fee tier — often 10 to 12 percent. Reconciling those fees back to the campaign reveals which promotional offers are actually accretive to margin and which are subsidizing the finance partner at the contractor's expense.

Allocera's CDAI engine reconciles financing fees as part of Layer 7 in the seven-cost stack. Merchant fee data is ingested via CSV upload or partner API, attributed back to the originating lead through the CRM-to-finance-partner join, and folded into the true cost per acquisition for every active campaign. The output is a contribution margin per campaign that reflects what the contractor is actually keeping — not what the dashboard reports.

The contractors who reconcile financing fees back to campaign margin make different scale decisions than the ones who don't. Over twelve months, that difference compounds.

The Question Every Home Services Operator Should Be Able to Answer

For any home services operation spending five or six figures monthly on paid acquisition, one question separates the operations that are managing margin from the ones that aren't:

What is your true cost per signed and financed job, per campaign, after merchant fees, refunds, and chargebacks?

If the answer is "approximately" or "by channel, not campaign" or "we look at it quarterly when we close the books," there is a margin question your current reporting stack was not built to answer. The financing fee layer alone — at 5 to 12 percent of every financed job — is large enough to make the difference between scaling a profitable campaign and scaling an unprofitable one. Allocera's CDAI engine issues directives on every campaign based on true reconciled margin, not dashboard CPL. We covered the directive logic in our Scale, Hold, Cut, Pause framework breakdown.