#payments
Manage payment processing, tracking, and reconciliation efficiently
Meta shut down native checkout on Facebook and Instagram Shops, shifting payment processing, sales tax collection, and order records entirely onto seller websites — here's how to reconcile revenue, fees, and tax liability under the new setup.
New York's NYDFS has proposed the first state BNPL licensing framework, requiring lenders to obtain a license and merchants to transmit refund credit statements within seven business days of approving a return.
US iOS developers can currently run external purchase links at 0% Apple commission while courts settle a replacement rate. This guide covers the bookkeeping fallout — the merchant-of-record shift, sales tax nexus, reconciling two 1099s, and Apple's 15-day transaction reporting rule.
B2B Buy Now, Pay Later platforms pay suppliers upfront on Net 30/60/90 invoices and take on non-recourse collection risk, with transaction volume around $14 billion in 2023 forecast to grow at over 25% annually through 2030.
Check fraud losses hit roughly $21 billion in 2023 and mail-receptacle theft rose 139% between FY2019 and FY2023. This guide covers the accounts-payable controls that actually stop check washing — positive pay, weekly reconciliation inside the UCC 4-406 window, gel ink, and separating check-writing from reconciliation.
Dynamic currency conversion (DCC) marks up foreign-card payments 3-7% above the interbank rate — sometimes 12-18% — and splits the revenue among DCC providers, acquirers, and merchants. Here is who profits, the Visa/Mastercard disclosure rules merchants must follow, and how to book DCC rebates and settlement variances separately from sales revenue.
A 1% federal excise tax applies to cash-funded international money transfers starting January 1, 2026, but bank, debit, and credit card transfers are exempt — here's how small businesses can avoid it.
Stripe Billing suits developer-led SaaS teams under roughly $500K MRR, Chargebee fits non-engineers managing complex pricing above a monthly platform fee, and Recurly's ML-optimized dunning recovers 40-70% of failed payments versus about 15% with no intervention.
Toast charges roughly 2.99% + 15¢ per transaction, Clover about 2.3% + 10¢, and Square 2.4–2.6% + 15¢ — a side-by-side breakdown of POS pricing, hardware costs, and contract terms to help restaurant and retail owners pick the right system in 2026.
Visa lowered its VAMP excessive-merchant threshold from 2.2% to 1.5% on April 1, 2026, with fines of $8 per flagged transaction, and Mastercard's Excessive Chargeback Program still triggers at 100+ monthly chargebacks — here's how the ratio math catches small merchants off guard and how to bring it back under the line.
The x402 protocol has processed more than 150 million AI agent micropayments worth roughly $600 million a year in stablecoins, and Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, and Google have all shipped competing versions since — here's what small businesses need to know about the bookkeeping and tax implications before the volume arrives.
The GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, creates the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, and small businesses accepting them must record fair market value at receipt, track cost basis per transaction, and prepare for Form 1099-DA reporting starting with 2026 transactions.
