What a $45k invoice really costs to process

Percentage fees on bank payments quietly make “receiving money” one of an invoice business’s biggest operating costs: at 1%, a $45,000 invoice costs $450 to collect, and $2M of annual collections costs $20,000 — for transfers that cost the platform roughly the same to process as a $450 one.

The math comes from a general contractor with ten employees, writing in Reddit’s r/Construction community: his accounting platform charges 1% for online bank payments, “so a $45k invoice costs us $450 to process.” The $25 flat option can’t be set as the default, so he adds a $25 credit line to invoices and asks customers to pick it themselves — “very unprofessional, but better than playing the ‘check is in the mail’ game.”

He’s not an edge case. He’s what happens when invoice-shaped businesses run on checkout-shaped pricing.

Percentage fees are priced for a world you don’t live in

A percentage fee makes sense at a card checkout: small amounts, consumer fraud risk, interchange costs that genuinely scale. A £60 basket paying 1.5% is 90p. Fine.

An invoice business is the opposite: fewer payments, much larger, from known counterparties, usually by bank transfer. The platform’s cost to process a domestic bank payment is essentially flat — pennies, whether the transfer is $450 or $45,000. Charge 1% anyway and the effective mark-up on a large invoice runs into the tens of thousands of percent over cost.

Run your own numbers for one quarter: total processing fees ÷ number of invoices collected. Contractors, agencies and distributors doing this exercise for the first time routinely find their “payments cost” is one of their top-five operating expenses — hiding in plain sight because it’s deducted, never invoiced.

The menu of bad options (and what each really costs)

• Eat the percentage. The default. On $2M of annual collections at 1%, that’s $20,000 a year for moving your own money.
• Push customers to cards. Now it’s ~3%. One HVAC owner summarized it: “my biggest contractor wants to pay with credit card — 3% of my gross margin.” He accepted, because it was his biggest customer. That’s not a payments strategy, it’s a hostage situation.
• Surcharge the customer. Regulated differently by region, and it moves the resentment rather than removing it.
• Fall back to cheques. Free per transaction and costs you 5–10 days of float per invoice, plus the occasional “it’s in the mail” — three times. The industry ran on this for decades, which is why it also ran on chasing.
• The $25-credit workaround. Honest, functional, and slightly humiliating every single time — as its inventor freely admits.

None of these fix the actual mismatch: the fee’s shape is wrong for the money’s shape.

What to demand from any provider (including us)

1. Flat or capped pricing on bank-transfer collections. The one-line test: “what does a $45,000 invoice cost me to receive?” If the answer scales linearly with the amount, keep shopping.
2. The cheap rail as the default, not the buried option. The contractor’s real complaint wasn’t the fee’s existence — it was that the platform defaulted every customer to the expensive path and hid the flat one.
3. No fee surprises at reconciliation. Deductions taken silently from settlements are how a $450 charge hides for a year. Fees should be line items you approved, visible where the reconciliation happens.

The Fynex position

We think the fix is embarrassingly simple: price the payment like the payment costs. Collecting an invoice by bank transfer through Fynex doesn’t cost a hundred times more because the invoice is a hundred times bigger — and the pricing sits in the open, before you send your first invoice, not inside your settlement report.

The contractor with the $450 fee wasn’t asking for much: to receive $45,000 he’d already earned without paying a tax for the privilege. That’s a reasonable ask. Run your business, not your books — and stop tipping your software for your own revenue.