Bitcoin Forum

I have a business where I issue an invoice in the beginning of the month which is due on the 20th day.
I'd like to add an option to pay in bitcoin.

Here's the problem. If I use the exchange rate to EUR at the beginning of the month, the customer can choose bitcoin if the price falls. If the price increases he'd better stick to EUR.

How may I solve this problem?

You could offer this option at the rate that can be viewed when they log into their account on your website.
They can them view the current amount and can decide if they want to pay or not. The amount can be recalculated on the fly if the exchange rate changes.

hmm maybe a timer which will give them about 15 minutes to pay the invoice, so that you will be protected from price drops and you wont lose profit.  I seen a few websites with this kind of software espeically the ones that sell hosting and domains.  Im sure someone can point you in the direction for that software or script.  if not then you can hire a freelancer to make one for you.

Don't offer a fixed Bitcoin rate.  Allow it to be paid via Bitcoin but at the current rate around the time it was paid.  The customer should use a price within the hour it was paid, something fair like:

https://bitpay.com/bitcoin-exchange-rates

The price source also needs to be fixed, the customer should not pick the price source. 

Also don't sweat all of this stuff for invoices under $20.  Please. 

Let's suppose that you charge $600 for rent and collect half of it up-front. You only collect half of the bitcoins and the renter promises to pay you the rest by mid-month. Actually, you can guarantee the value of the total coins is $600. Here is how:

On bitcoin derivatives exchange ICBIT, the futures contracts rollover in the middle of the month, so you could sell the current month contracts at the start of the month to cover your anticipated mid-month expenses. This works because the exchange uses leverage and you need less than $300 on deposit in order to sell 60 contracts (to cover $600 in anticipated mid-month expenses).

This is nice because the carrying of the futures contract earns a nice interest on the deposit (which you can pocket since you are not requiring full payment up-front). As a result, you and the renter are able to fix a bitcoin rate for the short-term debt, if desired.

If you allow payment in BTC, then don't state an amount in BTC. Instead, state that payment is allowed in BTC using the the exchange rate at the time of payment.

I agree with the most recent post if you do not want to eliminate risk.  Just state the price in EUR and they can pay the equivalent via Bitcoin based on a rate at an exchange you specify.

The question for you as a provider/merchant is what would you do with the Bitcoins?  Keep them or immediately turn to fiat.  If fiat then you might just want to use an online payment service process your payment via bitcoin that way and have the service do the exchange rate.  Basically like Bitpay does.

I once received an email invoice from a merchant with a Coinbase account that was denominated in US dollars.  It seemed to me that the QR code was "dynamic" such that it updated every time you opened the link with the correct exchange rate.  This ensured that the merchant received the invoiced amount in US dollars regardless of the exact time that I paid.  So I think Coinbase has already solved your problem (assuming they support euro conversions too).    

th way some hedge the risk is lets say you put a bitcoin price today for 1btc ~Euro309
well you already have bitcoin (your personal investment) and you withdraw YOUR 1btc to give you 309ero's to cover bills, supplier costs and staff wages. and the customer pays you 1BTC to replenish your investment.

the other option is to just show the fixed price (euro's) on th invoice and mention 'we accept bitcoin, please go to www.yourdomain/paymentbybitcoin/?invoice=12345

where your site is set up to show the customer the QR code of a bitcoin payment address with a bitcoin value that is adjusted every 15 minutes.

You could use a blended price, like the one on blockchain.info, or winkdex.com or something like that.   Or you could just disclose on your page, that you go off of one specific exchange like Bitstamp, or BTC-E, etc...

There really needs to be a more mature way to establish the GLOBAL value of Bitcoin.

There is no such thing as a "GLOBAL value of Bitcoin". It is not possible if different people are willing to buy and sell it for different prices. There is no such thing as a global value of anything.

I'd go with 10,000 $ per coin.

A bitcoin is the same everywhere. There are no "cheap third-world" bitcoins. There are no expensive shipping costs for them. I think bitcoinaverage.com does a pretty good job weighting the global price.

I just wrote down an idea for how to make a bitcoin invoice here:
http://bitcoinplusplus.com/2014/05/issue-bitcoin-invoice/

To summarize the invoice links to a web page with payment instructions at current exchange rate. When you issue the invoice you add this url with a set of parameters. The payer can only open this url a limited number of times, and each time is logged. This makes it impractical to cheat on the exchange rate while the payer still has the flexibility of paying at the time he sees fit.

I hope someone programs this and makes it open source. I'd use it for my own business.  :)

You could add a disclaimer that the price in BTC is only valid if the price on BitStamp (for example) is within 5% of $657.11 and that is the price on BitStamp is below that threshold then they would need to pay an amount that uses the current BitStamp rate plus 4% (1.04 times the current BitStamp rate). Your customers could go to your website to get the most up to date amount of BTC they should pay to settle the invoice.

Another option would be to give a discount to pay via BTC but the invoice would need to be paid in a smaller window of time. In this case you would still be taking on exchange rate risk but it would be smaller.

If you do not plan on converting your BTC to fiat right away then you could do nothing and essentially let your customers pay less in BTC when the exchange rate decreases, this would cause happy customers (they got a discount) which would likely result in more repeat business and more referrals of other paying customers.

You price your invoice in terms of fait, but offer some kind of discount if paid in bitcoin. You reference an exchange to base your rate off of.

Blockonomics has this feature. You can invoice in fiat and get paid in bitcoin, it automatically shows btc based on current exchange rate
https://medium.com/@blockonomics_co/peer-to-peer-bitcoin-invoice-1660e9439520#.itqw0n5rk

@OP for you it is not a problem right, because even it the price is better for the client, you still get the same fiat amount?
I would not advice implementing extra features to get some pennies (unless you are selling high end stuff).

My experience is that people who prefer bitcoin, will use bitcoin either way.