What is PCI Compliance?

Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) compliance refers to the technical and operational standards that businesses must follow to ensure that credit card data provided by cardholders is protected.

These standards were developed by the  PCI Security Standards Council, which was founded by American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB International, MasterCard Worldwide, and Visa Inc.

For more information on PCI Compliance, including a list of the 12 key requirements, check out this detailed article from Forbes: What Is PCI Compliance? Everything You Need To Know

Do I Need to be PCI Compliant?

Payment cards like Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover require PCI compliance every year.

If your business accepts, stores, or transmits payment card data, you have to be PCI compliant.

How Do I Become PCI Compliant?

The easiest way to become PCI compliant is don’t collect/store credit card numbers yourself. There are plenty of options for collecting payment that handle it all for you, including PCI compliance. These include QB Payments, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Shopify Payments, Google/Apple Pay, etc. 

Any payment processor should have compliance documents you can look over to verify they’re PCI compliant. Here are the PCI compliance documents for QuickBooks Payments and Quickbooks Point of Sale.

If you’re using a PCI compliant payment processor and not collecting/storing credit card information you should be good.

If you have any questions about PCI compliance you can contact the PCI Standards Security Council.