Re: Financial matters of Guix Foundation

[Andreas Enge]

Hello again,

Am Wed, Nov 27, 2024 at 10:11:55PM +0100 schrieb Andreas Enge:
> The Debian booth also had a little credit card terminal, which looked like
> the one I saw for the first time at FOSDEM. It comes from Sumup:
>    https://www.sumup.com/en-us/
> Strangely, their pricing seems to depend a lot on the country.
> If I buy it from France, they have a Black Friday price for the card reader
> of 19€ plus VAT, and then taking payments costs 1.75% in person (tapping
> a card) or 2.5% online, without monthly fees:
>    https://www.sumup.com/fr-fr/tarifs/

I took the plunge, and had one of the most pleasant account opening
experiences in a long time. Certainly much better than with the French
online bank where the app did not recognise the photo of my identity
card, and upon calling them they said they could not do anything for me
and had just cancelled my subscription.

I installed the SumUp app on my Android phone and proceeded to open an
account with them through Chromium on Guix. I chose "association loi
1901" as our "business" type and then was asked the RNA or SIRET number
(I forgot which one; both can easily be looked up on the web). As I did
not want to act in the name of Guix Foundation, I chose a different
association of which I am the president. The website looked up the details
(address and so on) in some open data portal, I declared my role
("president"), and that was it. To identify myself, I needed to switch to
the app and take photos of my identity card and a selfie. 5 minutes later
the account was confirmed, and I was presented with an Irish IBAN.
Strangely enough, they do not seem to have verified whether I indeed
have a role in the association. During the process I was also asked
whether I wanted to get a gratis credit card; I clicked "no", but the
app still shows me a credit card number. So far no card arrived in the
post, however.

There is an option to "pay by tap" with a credit card on a mobile phone
with NFC. I tried to enable it on my phone, but the app complained that
I had enabled developer settings. After disabling them, the app said that
everything should be okay, but still a test payment resulted in an error.
Maybe LineageOS with a lot of Google layers is not enough and one needs a
Goggle Android.

There is also an option to create "payment links", something like a
tinyurl encoding an amount and a comment. When you follow the link, you
can pay by credit card filling in a form like for any online payment.
If someone wants to give it a try with their 2024 or 2025 membership fee,
please come back to me.

Finally I ordered the cheapest payment terminal on their site, called
"Solo Lite". It just arrived in a parcel from Hypovereinsbank in
Germany. It connected to my phone via bluetooth, then used the Internet
connection of the phone to update its firmware and to process payments.
I managed to pay 1€ with my credit card. Immediately I saw a "payout" of
€0.98 (here go the fees!) in the app, which should be moved to my new
Irish bank account tomorrow, and from there I should be able to make a
free SEPA wire transfer back to my account from which the payment came :)

Back to Guix Foundation:
I think we should open a SumUp account with a gratis credit card
attached, which would be handy for making direct online payments.
The account should also work like a normal SEPA bank account.
It would be useful to set up a permanent payment link of 10€ so that
people outside Europe could easily pay their membership fee; every time
their would be banking fees of 0.25€, but I think this is okay.
For a bigger donation campaign, however, it would be better to go
through HelloAsso to avoid the fees. And for people inside Europe a free
SEPA transfer is still the best option.
The payment terminal is probably of little use: When we meet people in
person, they may as well pay in cash and we will avoid the banking fees.

What do you think?

Andreas