Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> writes: > > As to billing... I imagine that many consultants allready have the ability > > to process their own MC/Visa. Do you invision each person clearing their > > own AP or having a seperate company clear the payments? > > Is there any possibility of doing this with some sort of e-cash thing ? > Does anyone have any experience of e-cash ? Just wondering. >From what I've seen of e-cash - there is usually a pretty hefty commission taken by the "bank" that is offering the e-cash. I'm personally not a big fan of micro-payment systems. I'd rather just write a cheque once a month. > Otherwise, I don't know about the USA, but over here in the UK companies > tend not to be able to pay by VISA, so as someone with mostly corporate > clients, I've never seen the need to be able to process VISA. It might be > worth it for this project though. It's the same over on this side of the pond. Most companies I have dealt with will not buy anything unless they can get a corporate P.O. deal - with minimum 30 day payment terms (which their AP departments will stretch out for much longer). Still, the ability to process card payments is really nice when people want to use them (ie. end consumers) - it solves a lot of collection problems, so it is usually worth the 5% commission in those cases. > If we could work out a way of transferring funds by e-mail, that would be > perfect, since the vast majority of our clients will be sure to have e-mail > access. I think it's best to just keep a 'tab', and invoice them periodically. They'll like that better. One possibility of this arrangement I like is that we could offer a deal to CD manufacturers (ie. CheapBytes, LSL) to offer a Debian CD with support bundled in. They would pay us up front, and we would allocate time for each customer. We would just issue coupons with codes on them that would be valid for 30 minutes of consulting time, or something like that. > BTW Jim (Pick), please subscribe me to the mailing list you mentioned. Ok. When I set it up. Cheers, - Jim
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