Financial Issues
Regardless of how successful your marketing is, it's not much use if you can't get money off people.
Banking
Bet you never thought that your little one room B&B would turn out to be an international business!
Cash
Cheques Vacances
Foreign cheques
Accepting UK cheques is easy if you've retained a UK account, if you haven't, then you'll need to open one as French banks will charge you a fortune to cash sterling cheques. Few UK banks will allow you to open an account from overseas, the easy exceptions are Citibank and the Co-Operative in Guernsey.
To accept euro cheques from other countries, the only economic way that I've come across to do this is via Citibank. They'll let you deposit a euro cheque from anywhere into their euro savings account with no charges (it takes about two weeks to clear a French cheque).
Be very wary of cheques from non-European countries due to the fraud risk (see the section on fraud below).
Travellers cheques
Transferring money back and forth
If you only take euros, there are no problems but it's best to avoid accepting 200€ and 500€ notes due to the high level of forgeries with them. It's not economic to accept other currencies but if you travel regularly to the UK, accepting sterling might be OK.
These are quite a popular method of payment in France. You need to register with ANCV but could do this after accepting the cheques. They charge around 1% to cash them and list you in their directory when you register with them.
Write the passport number on the back and check the signature. Your bank will charge around 1% to cash euro denominated cheques. It's not economic to accept travellers cheques in other currencies.
The cheapest way to transfer money from the UK to France is to deposit it in a Nationwide Building Society Flexaccount and lift it out in France. Citibank are next cheapest at 0.9% (to change from sterling to euro). Barclays are next best at 2.75% charge if you withdraw from a BNP machine. Other banks usually charge £1.50 plus 2.75%.
If you find yourself needing to transfer money back and forth between pounds and euro, Citibank are brilliant. Open their Direct Current Account below (you can do this from outside the UK), then their euro savings account. With that you can deposit euro cheques from any country at no charge (it's about two weeks to clear French cheques) and change them into pounds for next to nothing (and vice versa) or just lift the money out here with the debit card.
You can also accept payment by bank transfer, a method that is very popular in Holland and Belgium. To accept international payments, you'll need to quote the IBAN number of your bank account (usually printed on your bank statement).
Accepting Credit cards
Although you can obviously not bother accepting cards, this can often lose you clients, so how do you go about accepting them? Essentially there are three different aspects to credit card acceptance which are quite different: 1) getting the little machine, 2) using credit card details as a guarantee and 3) accepting payments online.
The little machine
Using credit cards details in lieu of deposits
Accepting payments online
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worldpay, for the big players (the £200 setup fee rules it out for us smallfry);
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online merchant accounts, which appear to be only available in the US/Canada;
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nochex, available for UK cards only; and
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paypal, available pretty much worldwide.
You must have a business account with a bank before they will give you a machine. To get a business account in France, you need to be registered as a business at the Chambre de Commerce (for a Chambres d'hotes or gite business); there is no way around this requirement (cost around 50€).
The machine is called a TPE in France and will cost around 30€ per month if you rent it from your bank or getting on for 1,000€ if you buy one (not recommended at present as it's a lot of money but more to the point, as you may have noticed, the machines in France are all being changed at the moment and you don't want to be stuck with an obsolete model).
It costs around 1% of the transaction value for Mastercard, Maestro, Visa and Visa Electron. Carte Bleue cards are just rebadged versions of these cards (albeit with the chip added). The money usually arrives in your account the next day.
If you want to accept American Express (which is becoming more common), it's best to contact American Express directly as they'll then charge 3€ per month and nothing to install the facility on your TPE vs 5€ per month plus 50€ for the installation from Credit Agricole.
Diners Club isn't really widely used so it's probably not worth the extra to accept it. If my experience is anything to go by, it's not widely accepted because they don't reply to your e-mails asking to accept it!
In principle you can accept all the store cards that operate in France but unless you're based within, eg, Auchan it's not really going to be worth paying another 5€ a month to accept their card.
It might be worth accepting Aurore but I've never seen anyone using that card so I'm guessing that there aren't many of them around.
If you get a lot of Japanese or far eastern guests, it might be worthwhile accepting JCB (another 5€).
You can't accept Discover in Europe at the moment.
Once you've got your TPE, you can apply to have "vente à distance" ("customer not present" in english) added. This allows you to charge people without physically having the card in your hand at the time. It costs another 5€ or so per month.
With this facility, you can charge the deposit on receipt of the client's credit card details (get them to fax these rather than e-mail them for added security) or alternatively, you can just hold onto their details and charge them if they don't turn up (ie hotel style). Either way, you must have a very clear cancellation policy. We normally state that we will charge for the first night's accommodation unless the client cancels with us before noon our time on the first day of their reservation ie hotel-style but you could also do gîte style and charge a deposit at the time of booking.
Note: although you can do vente à distance for Visa Debit (aka Delta in the UK), you cannot do these transactions for Switch (currently being rebadged Maestro in the UK). Therefore you cannot accept Switch cards for guarantees. I think that this also applies to all Maestro and Visa Electron cards.
You could, in principle, do this through your French bank however the admin and charges that they apply for this facility are completely over the top (around 500€ for the software for a start) so it would be crazy to do it that way.
There are a number of ways to do this:
So, in practice, paypal is the only to go. It costs 3.4% plus 20p per payment with no setup fee.
You register at Paypal . You should use a UK address for this as the payment requests go out in the language of the country in which you say you are based. Whilst I have both French and UK Paypal registrations, I've never needed to use the French one. For security reasons, it's best to withdraw the money from your Paypal account once it gets to £50 (they charge you for withdrawals below that amount). Although you can ask for money in pounds and transfer it to yourself in euro or vice versa, it's best to stick to one currency as otherwise you end up paying a fortune in conversion fees.
Once registered, download the "payment request wizard". This lets you create a little e-mail asking people for a specific amount of money ie your deposit payment. So when someone e-mails you asking to reserve a room, you generate one of these e-mails in return and ask them to click on the button within it to confirm their reservation. They will be able to pay by most credit cards (ie Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Diners Club, etc.); in particular you should note that they will be able to pay their deposit using a greater range of cards than you can probably accept on your TPE (if you have one) so it's as well to tell them what cards you accept (if any).
You can also add a "buy now" button to your website but that's a bit risky as it could let people book weeks that weren't available which gets you into doing refunds etc.
Extra Income
As we all know a bit of extra income never goes amiss! One relatively easy thing to do is to run English classes.
