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In Praise of Off Shore Merchant Accounts

By: Trevor Tootle

There are plenty of smart and legal business accounting practices that can help you make the most of your money. One of those practices is to use off shore merchant accounts for your credit card processing needs. Not only can these types of accounts save you money, but also they are legal and they often provide service that is at the same level of service, or better, as the service you get on shore.

These days, no business, however small, is complete without a credit card processing facility. The reason for this is that a large number of people prefer to pay for goods and services with debit or credit cards instead of paying by check or cash. By adding the ability to process debit and credit cards, you can serve a wider range of customers. Thus, it is a smart business practice to offer this facility to your customers.

Once you start accepting debit and credit cards, you will need a merchant account to provide a way to process these transactions and ensure the proper transference of the money from the customers’ accounts into your account. A Merchant account is much like any other bank account that you have opened for your business, except that its main purpose is to facilitate the transfers of credit or debit card transactions. For accounting purposes, merchant accounts should be kept as a separate business account.

You can open a merchant account with one of many companies in the United States. But you could also look at offshore accounts available in countries in Central America, Europe and the Caribbean. An off shore merchant account can help you save money in many ways with respect to your debit and credit card transactions.

With the merchant account located off shore, the income from your credit and debit card transactions will often count as foreign income. Domestic income is taxed at a higher rate than foreign income. A tax attorney or accountant can help you with the accounting necessities to facilitate this option. Also, by choosing an off shore account, you can always choose to send less of your money to the United States.

Another way that this accounting trick saves you money is by making it possible for you to save money in upfront costs and security fees. Many on shore accounts require quite a bit of money for an opening account and for security reasons, and then keep back a certain amount of money, on top of the original security amount, each month in order to cover charge backs. Initial deposits and holdbacks for charge backs are usually lower with off shore accounts.

While some transaction fees in off shore accounts are a little bit higher, these are more than offset by the savings in other fees and taxes. Moreover, the service levels are often very good, as these offshore companies are actively trying to win and maintain customer accounts.

Checking out the feasibility of an off shore merchant account can be one of the smartest accounting moves you can make for your business.

Article Source: Main Articles

Trevor Tootle is the owner of F accounting, the best place on the internet for information about accounting, For more articles on accounting why not visit: www.rmaccounting.com/articles
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