No company money would ever be sitting in bitcoin for more than the few seconds it would take to transfer.
I know why you think this, but it is based on incorrect premises, namely that your expectations for quality of service from professional financial services firms apply equally to the Bitcoin "economy."
Consider, for example, the case where you ask your freelancer "What is the invoice in BTC?" and he quotes you "100 BTC". You go attempt to buy Bitcoins at the spot price of ~$100 each. You see a message saying "Your order has been placed, but to protect our customers, we are going to take the liberty of manually reviewing it." The following day, the order is canceled and the spot price of Bitcoins is now $140. You are now effectively short BTC, which is unfortunate, because you're losing.
There are other failure modes. They can be catastrophically expensive. As both a buyer and seller of consulting services, the notion that you're worried about a ~3% charge to transfer money to settle up a freelancing engagement is valuable signal with regards to the general level of business acumen being brought to bear on this decision. So, as somebody who wants both you and your freelancers to have happy, successful lives: bringing BTC into the picture brings in large extrinsic risks of project failure, when doing business with freelancers is already fraught with many risks. I would suggest avoiding it.
Regarding accounting issues: I wouldn't expect any but if your accountant is like my accountant I'd expect you to run up a few hundred dollars in fees prior to him being comfortable signing off on there being no accounting issues here.
Great answer. Thank you very much. Definitely making me think twice about the whole situation.
edit: Sorry, just want to be clear about this part:
"the notion that you're worried about a ~3% charge to transfer money to settle up a freelancing engagement is valuable signal with regards to the general level of business acumen being brought to bear on this decision."
Is your meaning here more towards:
3% is an insignificant amount to worry about on such an important part of your business
or
it's a good thing to try to stretch your funding as far as you can by saving costs like these
I don't want to discourage you, because everybody got started somewhere, but mentioning money transfer costs in the context of contracts/payroll (and considering paying in Bitcoin) waves a really big "We have never done this whole 'business' thing before" flag. I will repeat again that I'm on your side, but that is how the market will read it. (n.b. Anyone saying "I accept Bitcoin for my services!" is waving the same flag even harder.)
> No company money would ever be sitting in bitcoin for more than the few seconds it would take to transfer.
If the contract is in $ and you pay in BTC, you are essentially paying in $ and providing a convenience to the contractor of converting it to BTC for them; assuming you are relatively certain your additional cost would be more than the additional amount they would demand for payment in $ rather than BTC, this is a no brainer (providing that the agreement specifies how you are going to do the conversion, to minimize the risk that you get into a dispute with them over conversion details.)
If the contract is in BTC, the original volatility question ("would you like to be paid in currency that is worth $250 one day and $120 the next") still applies, though rephrased to focus on where your risk is: "Would you like to contract to pay in a currency that might be worth $120 the day you write the contract, and $250 the day you have to make the payment."
