{"id":10659,"date":"2022-03-16T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci029c50487008272a"},"modified":"2022-03-16T22:00:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T22:00:00","slug":"bitcoin-for-small-businesses-options","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/bitcoin-for-small-businesses-options","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin For Small Businesses: Front Line Options"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We\u2019ve discussed a few points<\/a> previously<\/a> about adding Bitcoin to the treasury of a small business, in order to address inflation as well as provide other benefits. Of course, one could acquire Bitcoin by simply taking the U.S. dollar (or other local fiat currency) and buying Bitcoin through an exchange. But there is another valuable route that any business should consider: accepting Bitcoin in exchange for goods and services.<\/p>\n

Below, we describe a few options that we have used for the small businesses that we’ve worked with. All of these businesses have employees, and are not sole-proprietorships, so we leave out options that may work fine when you\u2019re the only employee. Once you have employees, the business has additional concerns around training, ease of use and cash controls. The options below are the easiest we’ve found so far.<\/p>\n

Advantages Of Bitcoin Payments<\/h2>\n

In addition to avoiding the transaction fees charged by all exchanges, receiving payment in bitcoin provides other advantages. First, in many cases the traditional payment rails impose somewhat significant costs<\/a> (credit card fees, cash deposit fees and other payment processing overhead). Bitcoin can, in many cases, reduce these costs resulting in a few percentage points of extra revenue, without adjusting pricing.<\/p>\n

If your customers are paying with ACH or paper checks, you already have pretty low monetary and time costs to receive that money. In those cases, receiving Bitcoin may not reduce your costs by much (though we have increasingly seen banks charging by the item for these services too, and they\u2019ve indicated it will likely get worse over time). However, for wires or credit card payments by phone, receiving Bitcoin will enable lower monetary and time-use costs.<\/p>\n

Invoicing And Receiving Directly In Bitcoin<\/h2>\n

Perhaps the simplest method is for businesses that send out invoices for payment: it can be as easy as including an on-chain receive address on the invoice itself.<\/p>\n

This receive address could be generated anew for each invoice, or each customer could have a static one that is assigned to them. While making a new address for each invoice may sound like a bit of a pain, it provides several advantages, both for privacy and security reasons and for accounting. Of course, while also technically possible to just use one receive address for everything, that\u2019s really not a great idea as it would make bookkeeping harder later, while also potentially damaging your customers\u2019 privacy.<\/p>\n

In its most basic application, this method doesn\u2019t even need much in the way of special software, and it is very easy to execute in a self-custody manner. At the simplest, just taking extended public keys and generating many receive addresses and assigning them to customers or invoices (perhaps in a spreadsheet) is all that would be required.<\/p>\n

Invoicing And Receiving Website Payments<\/h2>\n

This is basically an extension of invoicing in bitcoin, but given the automated nature, it typically will require a service to run it. At one business we worked with we set up BTCPay Server<\/a> to accept Bitcoin payments on their website. This is not as trivial as setting up a generic e-commerce store, but we found it really only needs a few extra steps (at least when using WordPress and Woocommerce; other e-commerce platforms may be more or less complicated). With the speed of development by the BTCPay Server team, it is likely that this will become much easier very quickly.<\/p>\n

Point Of Sale (POS) Payments In Person<\/h2>\n

Here we get to the area that we believe is the most difficult realm for many small businesses. While some businesses, such as a vendor at a local farmer\u2019s market, may have some tools that are easy to deploy, others, such as a restaurant or hotel, have some additional complexities that take some thought to work through.<\/p>\n

These businesses have several additional concerns and complexities that an invoicing or web business doesn\u2019t necessarily face: <\/p>\n