What Crypto Payments Changed for a Consulting Business

We sell consulting, mostly to businesses, about a third of it internationally. Here is what a year of accepting crypto actually did. I wish I had looked at a regulated crypto payment provider with fiat settlement before rather than after.

Which invoices used it

Almost entirely the international ones. About half of those clients chose it once offered.

Domestic clients used bank transfer, as before. Nobody switched.

What it saved

On the international invoices, the difference was between a transfer costing about fifty euros and taking four days, and a payment costing about a dollar and arriving in minutes.

Across the year, a meaningful number on a category of invoice where our margin is thinnest.

What it did not change

Domestic payments. Cards and transfers work and are cheap. Offering an alternative changed nothing and cost nothing, which is the right outcome.

Our pricing. I had wondered whether it would become a negotiating point. It did not.

The cash flow effect

Larger than the fee saving, and I had not anticipated it.

Invoices that previously took four days to clear now clear the same day. On a business where payment timing matters, that is worth more than the fifty euros. If you are being paid rather than paying, a platform set up for client account handling handles the same thing in reverse.

What it cost us to set up

An afternoon choosing a provider, mostly spent eliminating three of five because they could not settle into our company’s registered name.

An afternoon writing the invoice template and the refund policy.

And about three days of learning by making mistakes, which the invoice template now prevents.

The mistakes worth knowing about

Naming the asset without the network, which cost nine days and a recovery fee.

Not saying who pays the network fee, which meant a third of early payments arrived short.

Not having a refund policy, which meant the first unusual request became a judgement call under pressure.

All three are one line each on the invoice or in the terms.

Would I do it again

Yes, and only for the international invoices. If we were entirely domestic there would have been no case.

That is the honest answer and it is the one I give people who ask: work out what your current payments cost, and if the number is small, this will not change much. Whatever I concluded, the balance I actually move sits at a regulated crypto exchange rather than wherever I signed up first.