| Great summary Scott. As you you know we are in exactly the same position as you. We have spent far more hours than should be needed to get to the place we are now. To get our merchant account (with one of the top 3 UK banks) took about 6 weeks. About 3 weeks was wasted with 'internal paperwork' that never got actioned. Another 1 week wasted on credit reference checks for the wrong person. I had to chase them every other day. If you are a UK startup, please do not underestimate the importance of considering VAT within your project! We made the mistake of integrating one of the leading SaaS recurring payment providers when we did not have a requirement for VAT. Our business quickly grew and we reached the threshold for having to register for VAT. That's when we realised that our chosen supplier did not support VAT, and we would have a to build a lot of custom functionality to handle VAT correctly. We are now in the process of migrating to a new recurring payment provider as this works out more cost effective based on our own circumstances. TOP TIPS FOR UK STARTUPS: A) Allow at least 6-8 weeks for your merchant account to be setup. Be prepared to chase the bank every other day until it's finalised. They won't chase you. They will do a credit check on you. You need to have a business bank account already setup. B) Consider the implications of becoming VAT Registered from the get go and how this will affect collecting and recording financial data. You can't charge VAT to people who are based outside of the UK, but once you are VAT registered you MUST charge VAT to all UK customers. C) Think about your billing requirements long and hard. Do you need to issue invoices? What information legally needs to be on them to satisfy the HMRC? Do you need to issue email invoices, PDFs? Do the invoices need to be online for the user to download? D) Choose your SaaS recurring payment provider wisely. Have a solid set of requirements before you start integrating. Play around with their free accounts and make sure that you have all bases covered. IT's going to be very hard to migrate providers when you have a lot of customer Credit Card data already collected. Make sure they have a defined process for moving your customer data from one supplier to the next. E) To accept payments (not using PayPal) you will need:
1) a business bank account
2) a merchant account (barclays, LTSB, RBS are a good start)
3) a payment gateway that is accepted by your merchant account provider (SagePay (UK), PaymentExpress (AU)...)
4) a UK, VAT friendly PCI compliant SaaS recurring payment provider (Recurly, Chargify...) We learnt a lot of lessons the hard the way, hope my comments save some of you time. |