In most agencies, payment processing is treated as an administrative function — necessary, but secondary to service delivery. That assumption holds until settlement timing begins to interfere with operations.
For early-stage and growth-focused companies, working capital is tightly managed, and even small delays in receivables can affect project timelines, resource allocation, and forecasting discipline. When payment infrastructure introduces recurring uncertainty, it stops being a back-office detail and becomes an operational constraint.
This is the context in which we decided to accept crypto payments at LaGrande Marketing. The shift was not driven by ideology or market positioning. It emerged from a need to remove timing friction from our billing cycle and bring greater control to how and when revenue becomes available for use.
Removing the Timing Dependency
Early-stage companies do not reorganize their billing workflows because of convenience. They do it because a gap in their current system keeps costing them something real.
For us, that cost was time lost on projects because of banking windows. A client missing a Friday wire cutoff could push a kickoff to Monday. ACH transfers meant waiting three to five days. Working capital management is already fragile enough for early-stage firms without adding settlement delays into the equation.
When we integrated a crypto payments solution provider, invoice-to-payment time fell from an average of 14 days to under 5. That change removed a timing dependency that traditional banking never bothered to fix. Once that gap was closed, going back simply did not make operational sense anymore. It was not a workaround — it was a structural change in how we control our money.
There was also less back and forth around bank cutoff times. Eliminating those coordination emails reduced friction internally and with clients.
Financial Impact
Faster settlement was the entry point, but what really changed was predictability.
Before integrating crypto payments, we built timing buffers into budget forecasts because we could not reliably predict when invoiced money would land. Our aging reports required second-guessing rather than serving as a straightforward planning tool.
Once invoice-to-payment time fell from 14 days to under five, those reports became reliable. That improved our ability to plan month to month without adding precautionary timing cushions.
Transaction costs shifted as well. The fee structure associated with crypto payments proved lower than traditional card processing. With four-figure monthly retainers, even a modest percentage difference becomes material over the course of a year and affects overall transaction cost structure.
The impact was not just faster access to revenue. It improved how we forecast and reduced transaction costs at the same time.
Risk Assessment
Treasury exposure was the first issue I took seriously. Holding a volatile asset between invoice and settlement is a real business risk. It was essential for us to avoid holding a volatile asset on our balance sheet. The settlement structure we implemented ensured that market exposure was removed from the transaction flow and that reporting remained in our functional currency.
On the regulatory side, we brought in a FinTech attorney before processing a single payment. State-level money transmission rules vary depending on where the client operates, so we wanted clarity before going live. We also created a compliance checklist to flag which states require additional documentation or reporting. The crypto processing handles KYC directly, which adds an onboarding step where clients upload government ID and proof of address before paying.
The most demanding adjustment proved to be operational. Integrating crypto payments required additional configuration of our accounting workflows and time to test reconciliation accuracy. The broader operational lift lasted several weeks before month-end processes felt routine again.
The learning curve was not horrible, but it was not plug-and-play either.
ROI showed up within about five months once we factored in reduced processing fees and time saved on payment follow-ups.
Outlook
Our crypto transaction volume tripled from Q1 to Q3 of 2025 without any promotional effort. Right now 12% of our retainer clients are paying by crypto cards. That tells me the existing demand is already ahead of how many vendors are ready to accommodate it.
The founders asking for crypto billing today are already holding operating capital in stablecoins or Bitcoin and do not want to convert back to fiat just to pay recurring expenses. That preference is unlikely to shift as they scale.
I expect the share of our clients paying via crypto to reach 25% or more within the next one to two years. The more telling signal will be when established firms — not just early-stage ones — start requesting crypto billing as a standard option rather than a special accommodation.
Conclusion
Accepting crypto payments was not about joining a trend. It was about closing a gap in our operational system that kept costing us time.
Once we removed the settlement delay, the additional coordination around banking cutoffs, and the unpredictability in receivables timing, going back to the previous model no longer made sense.
For us, crypto billing is not a convenience layer. It is a structural adjustment in how we manage working capital, improve revenue predictability, and reinforce operational discipline.
