The Problem
Every option had a catch
Bond Millen Gallery exists to put people in front of art that stops them. The Richmond, Virginia gallery represents and exhibits the work of living artists both regionally and nationally, and its buyers range from seasoned collectors to people just beginning to find their way in the art world. Founded by Page Bond in 1999 and acquired by Ashley Millen in 2023, the gallery carries forward a twenty-five year legacy of thoughtful curation under a new name.
Ashley’s days are spent on the work a gallery is actually for: researching new artists, cultivating and marketing the careers of the artists the gallery represents, and planning out the exhibition program. A significant share of her time also goes to the interior designers and art advisors who come to her with art needs for their own clients.
What her days were not meant to be spent on was chasing down payment for work that had already sold.
For a long time, the gallery accepted only paper checks. As checks became antiquated, it moved to taking credit payments through QuickBooks, and that introduced a different problem. Every transaction carried an automatic fee the gallery had no way to avoid, and in a business where a single work can sell for five figures, a percentage is not a rounding error.
We were automatically charged a substantial fee for every transaction which made this unsustainable. It was also a clunky experience between our invoicing and billing as they were not in sync.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
There was a third option, at least in theory. The gallery could send wire instructions to a client and let them push the money directly. In practice, almost no one did.
As an alternative, we would provide our wire information to clients but this was seldom used, I think because it was perceived as too difficult.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
So the gallery was left choosing between a payment method its clients no longer used, one that took a meaningful cut of every sale, and one that asked too much of the buyer. None of the three was built for the way a gallery actually sells.
The Solution
A link at the bottom of every invoice
The introduction came from Jenn Coles of Songbird Accounting, the gallery’s accountant, who suggested Nickel and then helped set it up. The piece that mattered most was one Jenn configured on day one.
She helped us to set up a seamless way to add on the transaction fee to any credit card charges which created meaningful savings for us.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
That single change reversed the economics of the old QuickBooks arrangement. Where the gallery had been absorbing a fee on every card transaction, the fee now travels with the payment, and a buyer who prefers a card can use one without the gallery giving up part of the sale. Buyers who prefer to pay by bank transfer pay nothing at all, and roughly eight out of every ten dollars the gallery collects now arrives that way.
The mechanics are deliberately simple. The gallery sends a PDF invoice with a Nickel payment link at the bottom, and the client enters the amount they owe and pays.
Sending a link rather than a fixed invoice amount has a practical benefit: invoicing is not bottlenecked on one person. Ashley is the only one with access to the gallery’s accounting software, but the Nickel link means anyone on staff can get an invoice out the door without it.
This way anyone on our staff can send an invoice without having to utilize my accounting software which only I have access to as the business owner.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
The gallery sells to two overlapping groups, and each has its own habits. Ashley most often invoices collectors directly, and occasionally invoices an interior designer or art advisor who will resell the work to their own client. How they pay varies, though she has noticed that professional collectors tend to reach for ACH more often.
More recently, the gallery turned on the other half of the platform. Selling a painting is only half of a gallery’s job. The other half is paying the artist their share, and until this summer that ran through an entirely separate system.
I used to issue payments through my bank. They would send a paper check via USPS. Transitioning to Nickel has been really seamless.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
Jenn stays connected to the account throughout, watching the whole picture from a bookkeeping perspective while Ashley and her team handle the payments themselves.
What the gallery has now is a single place where the money moves in both directions. Sales come in from collectors and designers without the gallery paying to receive them, artist payouts go out from the same account, and every transaction sits in one ledger rather than scattered across a bank portal, an accounting platform, and a stack of checks. For Ashley, the strongest argument is not the one about her own workflow.
Nickel is a great way to eliminate the worry associated with checks getting lost, and it makes it much easier on your clients than adding you as a wire recipient and going through those steps.
Ashley Millen, Owner & Director
