Systems and methods for providing merchant services with right-time creation and updating of merchant accounts. Merchant-specific information for each merchant is stored in a record and used to process purchase card transactions submitted by the merchant. When a user creates or updates a merchant account record, the user can indicate whether the update is to take effect immediately or at a user-specified later time. An immediate update is processed substantially without delay. Other updates are queued for later processing and processed at the user-specified later time.