Anyone else surprised by how much FX costs add up once supplier payments scale?
We’ve been paying more overseas suppliers over the last 6–8 months and honestly didn’t realize how messy the FX side would get once payment volume increased. At the beginning it didn’t seem like a huge issue because each transfer fee looked relatively small on its own. But now we’re sending payments every week across a few different countries and finance started flagging how inconsistent the total monthly cost has become. Some transfers arrive with slightly different amounts than expected, sometimes there are intermediary deductions nobody warned us about beforehand, and occasionally the exchange rate difference ends up being bigger than we estimated internally. One supplier even asked why the received amount was lower than the invoice when we thought we had already covered the transfer fee on our side. I think part of the problem is we never really paid close attention when international payments were still occasional. Now there are enough transactions happening that all the small differences are starting to stack up. Curious if most companies still just use traditional bank wires for this stuff or if people eventually move part of it elsewhere once volume gets bigger.