An unpaid invoice is rarely a trust problem. Most of the time it is a friction problem: the invoice arrived, the client meant to pay it, and the way you asked them to pay was slightly more inconvenient than putting it off. Every day that friction survives is a day of your money sitting in somebody else's account.
Perfex CRM ships with the obvious card and PayPal routes, which cover a great deal of the world and quietly fail for the rest. This post is about the rest: what the other payment rails are actually good at, and how to choose without ending up with a checkout page full of buttons nobody clicks.
We build and sell the gateway modules named here, so read this as a map of the terrain rather than a neutral comparison. The reasoning holds whichever module you end up using.
Payments are not one problem
The mistake is treating "accept payments" as a single feature to switch on. There are three genuinely different problems hiding inside it, and they have different answers.
| Problem | Looks like | What actually solves it |
|---|---|---|
| Recurring revenue | Chasing the same client every month | Direct debit - you pull, they do not push |
| Regional reach | A client who cannot use your checkout | The wallet or scheme they already have |
| One-off convenience | An invoice that sits unread for a week | Fewer clicks between the email and "paid" |
A card gateway is a good answer to the third and a mediocre answer to the first two. That is the whole reason this category exists.
Recurring billing: stop asking
If you invoice the same clients every month, the biggest win available is to stop asking them to pay. Direct debit inverts the flow: you collect from their bank account on a schedule they authorised once, and the follow-up email disappears from your life.
Two routes, and the right one depends almost entirely on geography.
GoCardless pulls funds from customers' bank accounts and records the payment inside the CRM, handling both one-off invoices and recurring subscriptions. Stripe SEPA Direct Debit does the same against SEPA-enabled bank accounts across the euro area - set it up once and it captures payments in the background.
If you are already on Stripe for cards, the SEPA module is the smaller step: one dashboard, one reconciliation, one set of payouts. If you are not, GoCardless is worth its own look.
The catch with all direct debit is worth saying plainly: it settles more slowly than a card, and it needs a mandate the customer actively agrees to. It rewards relationships that will last a year, not a one-off project.
Regional reach: the client who cannot pay you
This is the failure mode that never shows up in your metrics, because the client does not tell you the checkout did not work for them. They just pay late, or ask for a bank transfer, or quietly go elsewhere.
Mercado Pago is the answer across Latin America, where for a very large number of buyers it is not an alternative to the mainstream option - it is the mainstream option. Skrill sits alongside the methods Perfex already offers, for customers who keep their money there. myPOS collects invoice payments straight into a myPOS account, which matters if that is already where your business banking lives.
The test here is not "is this popular globally". It is "do I have clients in this market", and if the answer is yes, one gateway that fits them beats three that do not.
Crypto: a narrow, real case
BitPay lets clients settle invoices in Bitcoin, with the payment landing in your BitPay account.
Being honest about this one: for most businesses it is not worth the setup. The case where it is worth it is specific and does exist - you sell to a technical or international client base that already holds crypto, and the alternative for them is an international wire with fees and a three-day wait. If that is not your customer, skip it, and do not add it "just in case". Every payment option on an invoice is one more decision you are asking a customer to make.
Choosing without cluttering the invoice
More options is not better. A checkout with six buttons asks the customer to compare methods instead of paying, and the extra ones are configuration you maintain forever.
Four questions settle it:
- Where are your clients? Not where you are. Regional coverage is the only reason most of these modules exist.
- Is the revenue recurring? If yes, direct debit is a bigger win than any card optimisation.
- What do they already use? The right answer is almost always the method they do not have to think about.
- What will you actually reconcile? Every gateway is another account to check against the books at month end.
Start from your five slowest-paying clients and ask what would have made paying easier for each of them. That list is usually shorter than the catalogue, and it is the one worth acting on.
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