Invoice settings and exceptions

Invoices are an essential tool to conducting cryptocurrency payments. Confirmo’s solutions enable your business to generate advanced, unique QR-code invoices for receiving payments in cryptocurrencies no matter your business type. Let’s see all their functions and possibilities!

Let’s start from the very beginning: generally, an invoice is a payment request document. It is created by the party requesting the payment (a seller, business or contractor) and is delivered to party which is to pay (a buyer, customer or client), contains a unique identifier, and information about the transaction to take place – the amount to be paid, where the payment is to be sent, and what product or service the payment is for.

Cryptocurrency invoices most commonly use QR codes for condensing the “where” and “how much” into a simple, scannable format that works well on mobile devices and computer screens. The information contained will always contain at least the wallet address of the recipient, and can also contain a pre-set amount to be paid. Upon scanning this QR code, most wallet applications will then automatically fill out this information, only for you to authenticate the transaction – just like QR payments in the banking apps of today.

Using Confirmo in your business brings multiple advantages over displaying your wallet address on your website, or using a mobile wallet for all payments:

When using a static QR code on your site to accept crypto payments or donations, you have no way to easily link payments to orders but through guesswork.
This makes this solution untenable for anything beyond donations or very low numbers of daily transactions.

Using a personal mobile wallet in a retail business requires you to share a single wallet (and thus device or wallet seed) with multiple colleagues or employees.
Furthermore, a mobile wallet app can not only receive funds, but also send them out, which puts your assets into jeopardy.

Confirmo enables you to automate the generation of invoices by implementing our API, WooCommerce plugin or payment or donation buttons (in Payment tools) at the end of your checkout flow, and each Confirmo invoice has a unique identifier that you can pick up on your backend and pair with an order from your frontend, which makes payments in crypto as seamless as using standard fiat payment gateways. Should you require a more hands-on approach, Payment tools also offers the option to create manual email invoices.

Using the Confirmo point of sale then solves the problem of having to share a single wallet with multiple people. You need only one Confirmo account to receive payments on any number of mobile devices, and these can only receive payments, not send them out. Simply go to Payment tools, select POS setup, and choose your preferences. You will be shown a pairing code for the new device. Install the app (from App Store or Google Play) on the device, enter the code, and you’re good to go! Payments routed through all channels will be deposited to your Confirmo account.

Invoice settings

Over the years, we have worked hard and incorporated your feedback to optimize the functioning of our invoices for the convenience of you and your customers. Currently, invoices are active for 15 minutes by default, and can be dynamically extended in Invoice settings to minimize the number of expired invoices. If you have chosen to be credited in fiat currency, the moment your customer chooses their cryptocurrency of choice for the payment, the exchange rate to your preferred fiat is affixed to protect you and your customer from crypto volatility.

You can customize the behavior of your invoices in Invoice settings even further. In order to minimize the management of refunds, under- and over-paid invoices, and transaction fees, we recommend that you visit these settings and set your preferences. First, you can set how long an invoice is active before expiring. Invoices to be converted to fiat are by default set to expire after 15 minutes and can be extended to a total of 45 minutes, whereas invoices to be received in cryptocurrency can remain active for a total of 24 hours. These settings help keep the invoice active longer in case your customer is taking longer to complete the payment, and in times of high traffic on a given blockchain when transactions take longer to be broadcasted to the network.

Certain platforms, such as large cryptocurrency exchanges, batch customer transactions to save on fees. This can sometimes lead to delays in the clearing of dispatched payments, so customers paying from such platforms may have problems completing their payments if you don’t adjust these settings.

Alternatively, you can choose to delay invoice expiration through Automatic expiration prolonging. This function will extend the expiration by 5 minutes as long as the exchange rate is in your favor, up to 60 minutes total. This setting is more streamlined and elegant, but it removes the option to always have a guaranteed expiration time. Experiment with these settings to see which works better for your business and customers.

Finally, Confirmo allows you to set an underpayment threshold. Invoices may be flagged as underpaid even if an underpayment amounts to just fractions of the requested payment. This can lead to refunds and the need to repeat the payments, which can then lead to additional transaction fees, and at times of high blockchain traffic these can grow to volumes greater than the underpayment or even the actual amount to be paid, which usually doesn’t make for happy customers. It may be a good idea to offer your customers a little bit of wiggle space by setting a percentage and maximum EUR equivalent for the value of the underpayment that you will still tolerate and accept as a valid payment. This can also help limit the number of underpaid invoices and offload work from your customer support and operations departments.

We recommend that you experiment with these settings, starting with minor changes, and adjusting them to your preference. They are important to optimizing your operations and customer experience, so it is a good idea to give it a try and find a balance that will yield you the best results possible. Different businesses offering different products and services may have wildly different settings and risk tolerances, so there is no one single generally recommendable setting. Either way, you can only find out what works for you and your customers by diving into Invoice settings yourself!

Almost every number of statistical data in our universe is distributed along a gaussian curve, with the majority in its average, and the exceptions on the margins. The same applies to invoice exceptions. As you already know, the Show exceptions first checkbox in your Invoice overview filter lets you see invoices that have expired and were overpaid or underpaid. Use this feature to display failed payment attempts or ones which need your attention and resolution. These either require that you refund your client or create a new invoice and retry the payment. By managing your settings well, you stretch out the gaussian curve farther out, optimizing the accepting of cryptocurrency payments in your business to the enjoyment of you and your customers.