Lesson 18: Outlook on Taxation, Accounting & Legalities None of the following information qualifies as legal advice. With all of the issues described next it is strongly recommended to consult with your accountant. When a customer makes a payment, you might simply issue a credit to their account. Ideally, you want to enter it in a way that suggests you received a payment. If on the other hand, you're giving "discounts" for Bitcoins, but then you are selling the Bitcoins for currency and then counting that as income, then chances are good that your calculation of income is making up for it. Ask your accountant. If your business sells gift cards or gift certificates, you may find that the easiest way to accept Bitcoin is to accept it only for the purchase of gift cards, and then require the gift cards to be used for actual purchases of goods or services. This way, the accounting practices you already have in place for processing gift cards can be put to use. The accounting for Bitcoins would then be minimized to tracking sales of a single SKU. This method is also ideal for retail food establishments and convenience stores, where the payment of Bitcoins through a mobile phone for a small daily food purchase might be cumbersome or disruptive, especially in front of a line of other customers. Bitcoins in this case would be best used to reload prepaid cards that can then be swiped at point-of-sale. If you don't accept gift cards, but you already accept credit cards through a swipe terminal, consider the possibility that you could add a retail gift card system through the swipe terminal you already own. Many point-of-sale terminals, including ones from VeriFone®, are designed around the ability to support multiple applications on the same terminal. Gift cards are also highly profitable because of "breakage", or in other words, the fact that a significant percentage of them never get redeemed. You could consider adding a private label gift card program from a provider who specializes in this, not just as a jumpstart to accepting Bitcoins, but as an extra boost to income. A private label gift card service provider necessarily have to handle your funds - they can simply provide a solution that keeps track of the balance on the cards on your behalf, including features that allow users to check their balances by phone or by web. Such a solution, of course, is also what makes the cards swipeable through the card reader. If your business sends out invoices to customers, adding one line may make a huge impact for the Bitcoin economy. Perhaps you list it as a payment option just after Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, even if that means your customer must call or email to make a payment.
If you have access to the programming expertise such that you can generate Bitcoin addresses programmatically, consider generating a brand new Bitcoin address for each invoice, and print it on the invoice. When a Bitcoin payment arrives, you'll automatically know where it should arrive. As for how to decide what a Bitcoin transaction is worth: the IRS, as of 2017, hasn’t issued a guide mentioning how to value Bitcoin transactions. But they have rules and guidelines on how to value transactions made in foreign currency or "cash equivalents". Therefor, the accounting would be similar. With Bitcoins, there's likely to be some difference between the value of BTC when you received them as payment, versus when you go to exchange them for another currency like USD, should you decide to do so. This scenario, likewise, would be no different if you accepted foreign currency or gold as payment. Under some scenarios, it might make sense to book the dollar value of BTC income as it is received, and then to book any difference incurred when it is exchanged for fiat currency. Under others, it might make sense to book the whole thing at the time of exchange. You don't need to get into a discussion with your accountant about blockchains and private keys or the philosophy behind a decentralized currency. By comparing the fundamentals of Bitcoins to accounting concepts already well understood by the public, you can probably get all the answers you need. Overall, as cryptocurrencies become more popular, more and more governments will attempt to regulate their usage. As this is still a phenomenon in very early stages of development, what is considered legal now may not be in the near future, should the regulator decide to push forward with new regulation.