Billable

Recording what a payment really cost

Record what actually landed when an invoice is paid, split the disclosed fee from the margin hidden in the exchange rate, and see which payment route costs you most.

5 min read

You billed one number and a smaller one landed. This is where the difference goes on the record instead of being written off as “bank stuff”.

Step by step

  1. Mark the invoice paid — When the money arrives, mark the invoice paid. Billable asks what actually landed.
  2. Enter what arrived — The amount comes prefilled with what the invoice was worth at that day’s mid-market rate. Change it to what you actually received, and add the date.
  3. Say how it came — Pick the route the payment took: your bank, Wise, PayPal, a marketplace. This is what lets Billable compare routes later.
  4. Add the fee they showed you — Optional, but worth it: entering the fee the provider disclosed splits the total cost into the fee they admitted to and the margin buried in the exchange rate.
  5. Read it back — The settled invoice carries a payment card showing what was kept, what percentage that is, and the same cut annualised. Your dashboard rolls every payment into a “lost in transit” total, a weighted average cut, and a breakdown by route with the steepest first.

What to do with the number

If one route is consistently taking a bigger cut than the others, that is an argument for asking the next client to pay a different way — and now you have the figure to make it with.

Quirks worth knowing

The small things that trip people up.

The amount is prefilled at that day's mid-market rate

Accepting the prefilled figure unchanged records a clean payment with no cut. Anything less than it is the difference, worked out for you live before you save.

Most of the cost is not the fee they printed

A disclosed fee is only half the story. The rest hides in the exchange rate you were given, and Billable shows the two separately so you can see which one is really hurting.

It never moves your headline totals

Recording what a transfer cost does not change your revenue. The cost lives in its own section — your income stays your income.

The whole thing is optional

If you do not care on a particular payment, mark it paid and move on. Nothing else in Billable depends on you filling this in.

The route is what makes the dashboard useful

Recording how the money came — bank, Wise, PayPal, a marketplace — is what lets the dashboard rank routes by cost. Skip it and you get a total but not a culprit.

The same cut is shown annualised

A few percent on one invoice is easy to shrug at. Seeing it as a yearly number is what makes it worth changing how you get paid.

More about see what transfers cost →

More guides

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Running more than one business

Create a separate organisation per business, each with its own clients, invoices and branding, and switch between them from one menu without logging out.

Chasing overdue invoices

Turn on automatic weekly reminders for overdue invoices, send a ready-written nudge yourself, and keep a log of everything that has gone out.

Still stuck on this?

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