Virtual Terminal WITHOUT merchant account?
You would need to setup a company (even if it's just a sole proprietorship, in the US) to be able to apply for a true merchant account.  And thus have a terminal; either real or virtual in your home or business. However, many services such as paypal allow you to accept credit cards (both online and with a card reader) and when the customer is billed it appears as paypal + your account name.  So you essentially have the benefits of a merchant account, without having to set one up.
I'm looking for another one right now. Here's what I've found: Los Alamos National Bank (www.lanb.com) has tokens ($5?), but I think they only open accounts for New Mexico residents. I've had one for several years. USAA Savings Bank (usaa.com) has tokens ($5 or free, I don't remember). I'm pretty sure you do NOT need to be a USAA member to open an account. I've had one for a couple of years. Several banks (Frost Bank, American National Bank of Texas, Amegy Bank, and probably many, many more) offer them as part of their Treasury Management accounts, meant for big businesses and charged for accordingly. Happy State Bank (in, where else, Happy, Texas) has a web page saying they have them but their services charges were more than I wanted to pay. ClearSky Bank (an Internet bank started by Chesapeake Bank) claims on their web page to have them but I haven't verified that yet. Still looking... If PayPal won't accept the VCC number, then by definition you can't do this. If you want to know whether there's a way to get special permission or bypass that restriction... I'm afraid the right thing to do is ask PayPal. Yes, I know their customer support is awful, but this is a classic customer support question, and they know the internals of their system better than any of us possibly could. "I think the survey needs to be broken down to ""as a consumer..."" and ""as a merchant...""  I'm not sure any service like the one you propose can be really implemented on the consumer side.   In particular, I suspect few if any consumers would pay for the privilege  You might look into the company ""Neat"" who sold a specialized scanner and software package designed around organizing reciepts a while back.   Retailer buy-in is a huge factor too.  You can create a platform and encourage retailers to send reciepts via email or whatever, but at the end of the day, a lot of retailers still see value in a reciept 5x as long as it should be to itemize the 22 ways you ""saved money"" and the 19 cross-promotions or coupons they want to inform you of.    Unless you can provide equal percieved value for them, they won't be interested, even if consumers like the concept.  The classic example in this debate is the US chain ""CVS Pharmacy""-- whose long reciepts are the butt of many jokes, but persist because they're part of an elaborate reward scheme where they give people coupons in the hopes of them coming back to use them.  As for the smaller vendors who may not be as tied to such strategies, they're also likely going to be less technically equipped to cope with  a new feature.  You almost need to target the POS vendors like NCR and IBM-- if you can make ""electronic reciept"" a feature in their platform, it becomes something that hundreds of stores are getting built into their systems for ""free"" and they just have to turn it on.  That's a lot easier than selling to every single retailer one at a time, and it would be a big enough launch that you could start to get customer preference" At one point you could log into your HSBC account from the command line, but gosh, I've never heard of a bank that has a command line interface! The best way is for X to work as Independent consultant fro c.com from India by raising monthly invoices for the work done. This will avoid the complications and paperwork associated by registering a LLC in US by XF and then employing X as independent consultant in India. X may need to fill out W8-BEN forms so that there is no withholding in US Edit: Independent consultant means without having to register any legal entity either in India or in US. There are no legal regulations in US or in India to hire an independent contractor / consultant. There maybe internal policy of C.com not to have independent consultants. Payments can be made via transfer to Bank account. Some banks would allow you to export your transactions as CSV (they call it Excel export, but in many cases it's actually just CSV). However, I would not expect any bank to bother with creating anything like command-line access - return on such investment would be too low.  There are other ways to get information out of the banks, I'm sure - providers like Yodelee must be using something to fetch financial data - but those usually not for general public access.  Also, you can use something like mint.com to aggregate you banking data if you bank doesn't do good export and then export it from there. They have CSV export too.  If you need to do any actions though, I don't think there's anything like you are looking for. If this is a pre-authorized automatic billing, and if you have signed any contract with the  merchant, cancelling may not block any future charges from the merchant.  Happens with gyms, magazines, memberships quite often. There is a time period after the cancellation this will occur, then it'll be completely dead. What you're referring to is Visa Easy Payment Services (VEPS). Other payment processors have similar programs. Basically, certain merchants (based on merchant category code - or MCC), are not required to obtain a signature under $50. This limit was raised to $50 from $25 last year. Here is the press release from Visa describing the increase, and the program in general. You should consider Turbocash. It's a mature open-source project, installed locally (thick client). There are thousands of processors. But I explicitly mentioned the customer experience, which is completely different and no matter how much you want your industry experience to matter for that, it doesn't affect it.  This you did not read and comprehend.  Could you clarify for me how VISA/MasterCard managed to block a merchant, who presumably wasn't a direct customer (but instead a payment processor customer), but cannot block a card holder? (yes, this is an honest question)  &gt; Visa and Mastercard prohibited payments to Wikileaks on the basis of WL allegedly facilitating illegal activity. How is that relevant to what PayPal's doing?  The WikiLeaks blockade was clearly political. What makes you say otherwise? And this is political.  &gt; No one is unable to accept payments if they're barred from PayPal.  In this case, yes. So who is morally and/or legally responsible when everyone does the same thing? Given your clarifying points, it sounds like you are running both businesses as one combined business. As such, you should be able to get just a single HST number and use that. However, let me please urge you to contact a professional accountant and possibly a lawyer, as it is very unusual to be performing these services without a business license, and you may be exposing yourself to civil penalties and placing your personal assets (e.g. your house) at risk. Additionally, it may be beneficial for you to run these as businesses as you can likely write off (more of) your expenses. I traded futures for a brief period in school using the BrokersXpress platform (now part of OptionsXpress, which is in turn now part of Charles Schwab). They had a virtual trading platform, and apparently still do, and it was excellent. Since my main account was enabled for futures, this carried over to the virtual account, so I could trade a whole range of futures, options, stocks, etc. I spoke with OptionsXpress, and you don't need to fund your acount to use the virtual trading platform. However, they will cancel your account after an arbitrary period of time if you don't log in every few days. According to their customer service, there is no inactivity fee on your main account if you don't fund it and make no trades. I also used Stock-Trak for a class and despite finding the occasional bug or website performance issue, it provided a good experience. I received a discount because I used it through an educational institution, and customer service was quite good (probably for the same reason), but I don't know if those same benefits would apply to an individual signing up for it.  I signed up for top10traders about seven years ago when I was in secondary school, and it's completely free. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for, and the interface was poorly designed and slow. Furthermore, at that time, there were no restrictions that limited the number of shares you could buy to the number of outstanding shares, so you could buy as many as you could afford, even if you exceeded the number that physically existed. While this isn't an issue for large companies, it meant you could earn a killing trading highly illiquid pink sheet stocks because you could purchase billions of shares of companies with only a few thousand shares actually outstanding. I don't know if these issues have been corrected or not, but at the time, I and several other users took advantage of these oversights to rack up hundreds of trillions of dollars in a matter of days, so if you want a realistic simulation, this isn't it.  Investopedia also has a stock simulator that I've heard positive things about, although I haven't used it personally. "Paypal linked with my bank account. 1.Can I use my Saving bank account to receive payments from my clients? Or is it necessary to open a current account? Yes you can get funds into your savings account. However it is advisable to keep a seperate account as it would help with your IT Returns. 2.I will be paying a certain % as commission on every sales to a couple of sales guys (who are not my employees but only working on   commission). Can I show this as an expense in my IT returns? As you are earning as freelancer, you are eligible for certain deductions like Phone calls, Laptop, other hardware, payments to partners. It is important that you maintain a book of records. An accountant for a small fee of Rs 5 K should be able to help you. In the Returns you have to show Net income after all these deductions, there is no place to enter expenses.   3.Since I will be receiving all the payments in Euros so am I falling under a category of ""Exporter of services""? The work you are doing can be Free Lancing.    4.Do I need an Import Export Code (IEC) for smoothly running this small business? You can run this without one as Free lancing. IEC would be when you grow big and are looking for various benefits under tax and pay different taxes and are incorporated as a company." So there are a lot of people that get into trouble in your type of self employment situation.  This is what I do, and I use google drive so there are no cost for tools.  However, having an accounting system is better. Getting in trouble with the IRS really sucks bad. "You don't. No one uses vanilla double entry accounting software for ""Held-For-Trading Security"".  Your broker or trading software is responsible for providing month-end statement of changes.  You use ""Mark To Market"" valuation at the end of each month.  For example, if your cash position is -$5000 and stock position is +$10000, all you do is write-up/down the account value to $5000.  There should be no sub-accounts for your ""Investment"" account in GNUCash.  So at the end of the month, there would be the following entries:"