👉 Note that this feature is only available with Stripe Payments, Bonsai Payments, or Paypal, not with other offline payment options.
With Bonsai's invoices, you have the ability to decide whether you or the client pays the payment processing fee on the invoices. You can set this either on individual invoices or for all of your invoices.
Updating Specific Individual Invoices
You can easily change who pays transaction fees for an invoice by going to the bottom part of your invoice and updating the dropdown that says "The client [will/will not] pay the processing fees..."
Updating Defaults For All New Invoices
You can change it by going to your Payments settings section here: https://app.hellobonsai.com/settings/payments and selecting the "Client will pay transaction fees on payments".
How are fees calculated when the client pays the fees?
When passing the transaction fees to your client, the fees essentially are billed on top of the amount due on your invoice. This increases the amount paid by your client, but leaves you (the contractor) with the full invoice amount after the transaction fees are deducted.
For example, let's say you send the client an invoice for $100 and you select the option to pay the fees. When the client goes to pay the invoice, they will actually be charged $103.40 if they pay by credit card or $101 if they pay by ACH, and you will receive exactly $100.
Bonsai and Stripe Payments (like most payment processors) charge different rates for Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, Discover, JCB, Diners Club, UnionPay (2.9% + $0.30) and American Express (3.25% + $0.30).
Because of how the payment flow works, we do not actually know what card the user is paying with until they submit the transaction. So, to handle the case of the client paying the fees with a credit card, we applied an average processing fee of 3.1% + $0.30 for these cases.
👉 Note that if there are any special promotions running related to processing fees, this blended rate WILL NOT be impacted. In other words, regardless of other promotions, the 3.1% + $0.30 will remain the same.
Foreign Exchange fees:
Also, a quick note about possible foreign exchange fees on your invoices.
When you create an invoice, always watch out for the currency you're sending the invoice in. Your invoices will be charged a foreign exchange fee if the currency doesn't match your payment country's currency. You can learn more about the FX fees here.