Payment Gateway
Not just client management and billing system, you need to consider, but also your payment gateway.
There are two types of payment gateways:
1. A merchant account – where you can process your client’s payments under your own company name.
2. A third party payment account – where another company processes your client payments and then sends you the funds periodically or provide you with an option to withdraw your funds at any time.
For US persons, as long as you have good credit, you should be able to obtain a merchant account with no problem. If you’re just starting out and your credit is not good enough, most merchant provider can still provide you with a merchant account if you can provide them with a guarantor which has a good enough credit.
If you’re residing in a country where obtaining a merchant account is considerably difficult, I would suggest starting out with a third party payment gateway provider. You won’t need a merchant account to get started since there are many third party payment gateway providers.
The most popular and trusted third party payment gateway provider is PayPal. Almost anyone can sign up with a free PayPal account to start accepting payments. I highly recommend you to save your time looking for other payment gateway provider and just go with PayPal.
Another reason to go with PayPal is most billing system can automatically integrate with PayPal, so you don’t have to worry about billing your clients manually.
You would need to confirm your bank account with PayPal to be able to withdraw your clients’ payments. The process is simple. PayPal would need you to enter your bank account details and will deposit a small amount of funds into your bank account. You just need to confirm the amount deposited by PayPal to your bank account to verify that you actually are the account holder of that bank account.
Once that process is completed you can receive payments from your clients and should be able to withdraw the funds into your bank account at any time. Some other option is 2CheckOut and WorldPay both offers solutions for people outside the United States.