Moni Talks Tech (and other things) is a show hosted by Monika Rabensteiner, a weird Austrian lady, who went on the journey to start her own business and is now here to tell the tale. But not only that: she will be caressing your earbuds with tips and tricks around tech tools and design - everything you need to make your online business work smarter not harder - and look better in the process.
Welcome to Moni Talks Tech and Other Things, the podcast where service based business owners and coaches like you can walk away with simple tips and tricks to level up your business and defeat the ultimate end boss, your dreaded tech set up. Are you ready for this then? Let's go.
Hello and welcome to another episode and today we are talking about THE thing that a lot of people enjoy and love and get really greedy about and then equally do really great things with it, this is a weird tangent to say we are talking about money, money, money, money, money. Yeah, I'm a proper singer here. Going full verse into it, yes, we are talking about money. In fact, we are talking about getting paid. Especially if you work in the online world, you potentially have a lot of clients from all over the world and sometimes getting paid is really tricky, especially if it's outside of the EU, for example, and you have clients in the US or you have clients in Dubai or wherever else on the planet your clients are located because it really doesn't matter since everything is going on online, they can be anywhere in the world.
They can be nomads, there cannot be nomads. It's totally irrelevant. But that also means that getting paid becomes a question at some point because you need to be ready for people to pay you and you need to make it really easy for them to pay you because you, you don't wanna be somebody that they have to faff around with so hard to pay you because there will be five other people where it's way easier to sign the contracts and get the deal sorted. That sounds like we're doing something illegal. , this is not, we are not smuggling any drugs. All right? It's just about ease and people love it to be easy and sometimes that means it comes with a bit of a fee, right? So my number one suggestion, which when I say number one is not in hierarchy, but in, that's the first thing that I'm mentioning right now.
So the first thing is PayPal. PayPal is really, really simple to set up and it's really, really easy to pay you. So you sign up with an email address, you put your bank details in the back of it. PayPal supports a lot of countries also. Sometimes those that you don't really think that would cover, but a lot of different countries are covered with PayPal, which makes it really easy. You sign up, put your bank details in the back of it and then you go ahead and people can start sending you money to an email address. It's as simple as that. There are quite a few downsides to it, which is the PayPal fees, the higher fee of all of of them so far and we are sometimes only talking about a lower percentage, but because it is so easy, they also have a higher fee for it.
At the same time, if you charge in different currencies, which is something I did at the beginning of my business but moved away from the conversion rate on PayPal is really not great. It is definitely costing you quite a bit of money to have the money converted in PayPal and then sent to your PayPal account. This is never comparable to whatever else you would like if you would've gotten it paid to your bank account and they make the conversion right there, that's often way better than what happens on PayPal. So that was always seemed to, to cut off a bunch of my income at the same time in addition to the PayPal fees. So yes, while it's the easiest one, it's also probably one that will take the highest cut from it, but at the same time it's easy, it's really smooth and that can sometimes win people over.
Then the second one that I have set up is a Stripe account. This works via credit cards so people can pay with their credit cards and then it will be sent to your bank account. It's not like PayPal where you use PayPal, basically like a separate bank account and can pay from it as well. They basically just deliver your money, like they collect your money and then deliver it to your bank account after a couple of days. The issue with Stripe is, well, the good thing about Stripe, let's start with the positives. The positives about Stripe is the fees are lower, they are lower than with PayPal, which makes it great for you obviously because you have lower fees. Also, Stripe supports quite a few countries by now, which is really nice as well because if you have your company, let's say set up in Dubai, Stripe also works with that one now and obviously mostly throughout Europe and the US.
Stripe is really easy to set up as well in general and it connects with a lot of things like Dubsado for example, has an option to connect you with Stripe, which just makes it easy for people to again pay you and you want it to be easy. The only issue, well a few issues, the Stripe itself used to be more complicated. It's now getting easier. So if you just use Stripe like that, you can also send invoices through it that didn't work as well previously but does now. So even if you don't have something like Dubsado that connects with it, you can still use Stripe natively, which is great. The only bad, like really a bit unfortunate thing is that it takes longer for your money to hit your bank account, which can be a bit annoying because by the time you get the money it still takes a couple of days until it actively reaches your account.
And even though you have quick payout, which I have now, it still takes longer than it would take from PayPal because as soon as you send your money from PayPal, you will have it in the next day or two and it still takes a few more days, especially over the weekend, if you get your money from Stripe. So overall Stripe and PayPal are definitely the easier ones to use and the ones where you have to faff around the least, let's say. What I also understand is that not everybody's a fan of the high processing fees or processing fees in general. And yes, if you work and have your clients in the EU, bank transfer will always be the best because you really have no fees aside from what your bank is charging you, which is mostly per line or whatever, however that works in your country.
So if you have it set up like that, that would still be the nicest way, the most lucrative way for you to go. Even though it's not necessarily the easiest way for people to pay you because you can set up, if you have a recurring client, you can easily set up autopay invoices in let's say Dubsado for example, and clients can turn that on and never even have to think about paying you again. So it automatically becomes less of an issue for people to pay you a reoccurring fee if they can set it up themselves, that will automatically take away effort and reduce manual steps for your client, which makes it great. And I know a lot of people, they really like to do this paying deliberately and that's totally fine, but some people don't want to carry the mental load of having to remember that they need to pay you.
And it's not that you don't send them the invoice, but at the same time it is a task that is necessary to remember in your head and if you know the person and trust the person and don't want to think about it anymore. And if you are fine with setting that up automatically, you can do that, which is something that you can't really do if you pay people via bank account, right? I'm not saying don't look at your finances. I think it's really important to have an overview of your finances that you know what's coming out, what's going in well, what's coming in and what's going out. And I'm not advertising for you to not look at your finances, but this is just one way to make it easier for people to pay you, which isn't the entire purpose of this episode. So now that we come back to bank transfers, the situation that I found myself in not quite unrecently is that I work with clients and with people that are in the UK and the UK has entirely different, especially now that it's off the EU grid has a different system for their bank account.
So there are some accounting numbers and there is an account in general and I don't know if they even do IBAN numbers anymore, but I had a bunch of invoices that needed paying recently that only had the account sorting number and things on that and I was like, I don't even know, I can't put that into my bank account details into my regular bank account details. And this is where Wise comes in. Wise used to be called TransferWise and is a banking account that can create that is really great for you to work with. If you have different sets of currencies and different sets of clients in different places. Not only is it really nice for you to transfer money to a different currency very quickly at the same time also you can set up different sub-accounts in your bank account basically that then functions like let's say a UK bank account because it has a sorting number and then a account code or whatever it's called.
And then you can have a US account that has like typical US bank account details or you can have one that's in the EU which has like an IBAN code and stuff like that. So it's really easy to pay people with Wise in the different currencies as well without it being super, super expensive with really, really high conversion fees. So if you have people in other countries definitely go have a look and you want to pay them with different currencies for example, or they you only have details from them that are very country specific, then Wise is this a really good way for you to go and to pay your clients as well? You don't necessarily need to transfer the money to your account once you send the money. It's really simple to pay whoever you want to pay or to receive the payment.
Receiving payments is easy, right? , you just get it sent to your account. But if you send money, there are a lot of different ways on how you can pay this specific fee that you're paying. So it could be that you paid with credit card, it could be that you pay it, just send it to it manually for example, and then transfer it over. Or you can use Klarna if you know what that is, there is a lot of different ways they give you to make it really easy for you to also pay someone and especially get paid as well because you can, um, function in whatever the client, whatever is necessary for the client and it still is going to be really lower on the lowest on fees you will probably ever come across. So yeah, moral of the story make it easy to get paid because people want to pay you and if you, you start out being really complicated, people are not gonna enjoy this and you are also not gonna enjoy it and you don't want to faff around with every payment that you, or every invoice that you send out.
You don't want to sit here and waste hours and hours and hours of time with like sending invoices, sending the emails, put as much automation as possible in place to make your and your client's life easier and especially invoices, especially if they're recurring. Make it as easy as possible for you and for your client and it will save you a shit ton of time. It will save your client shit ton of time and nerves and everybody's gonna be happy.
So thank you so much for tuning in again this week and see you again next week for another amazing episode of Moni Talks Tech. I can't wait to have you there and if you want to find me on social media, you can find me on Instagram at MoniRocksYourSocks, and you can check up my website at monirocksyoursocks.com and I can't wait to hear from you. Feel free to slide into my DMs and tell me what you think of this and if you also wanna tell me what to think of this, you can also rate the podcast, you know, in all the podcast catchers on Apple Podcast or an iTunes. No, not on iTunes, that's not a thing anymore on Spotify. There is now a way that you can rate the podcast and I would really highly appreciate it if you did, but no worries if not. So have a wonderful rest of your day and see you soon next week. Bye.