---
title: "What a $45k invoice really costs to process"
description: "A 1% bank-payment fee turns a $45,000 invoice into a $450 charge. Why percentage pricing punishes invoice businesses, and what to demand instead."
url: "/blog/what-a-45k-invoice-costs-to-process/"
date: "2026-07-12"
author: "Valeria Vahorovska"
tags: ["Guides","Payments"]
---

# 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](/home-services/), 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](/docs/accepting-payments/what-is-a-virtual-iban-and-how-do-customers-pay-by-bank-transfer/).** 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](/features/reconciliation/) happens.

## The Fynex position

We think the fix is embarrassingly simple: **price the payment like the payment costs.** Collecting an [invoice](/features/invoicing/) 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.