BitPay, a Bitcoin payment services provider, has added support for Intuit's popular Quickbooks software.

The new functionality allows merchants to import their complete BitPay transaction history, including orders, fees and payments into Quickbooks. Amagi Metals, which sells silver and gold online, is one of the first of BitPay's 10,000 clients to try the newly integrated service.

"We use Quickbooks for just about everything our bank accounts, our online transactions, with PayPal and now BitPay," says Stephen Macaskill, owner of Amagi Metals. "Everything gets sourced through Quickbooks effortlessly with one-click. We don't pay for additional bookkeepers and it's very much time-saving and easy to use."

BitPay supports Quickbooks by creating an Intuit Interchange File. BitPay chose to support Quickbooks to meet the demands of its clients.

"We have a help desk obviously and fielded a lot of requests and interest in a download," says Bryan Krohn, chief financial officer at BitPay.

Before the Quickbooks integration, merchants accepting Bitcoin had to manually enter their transactions from the ledger into their accountant system, Krohn says. BitPay launched the functionality on Sept. 16.

BitPay allows merchants to import transactions within a desired time frame. Amagi Metals has imported its transactions from the past year, and going forward it plans to reconcile its Bitcoin sales monthly, says Macaskill.

Denver, Colo.-based Amagi Metals started accepting Bitcoin late last year. Macaskill says he is a big advocate of the free market and he is interested in the alternative currency from an economic perspective.

BitPay "wanted our business and we could tell they were putting in the extra leg to get our business," Macaskill says. Plus BitPay's integration with Amagi Metals' ecommerce site was effortless, he says. BitPay has plugins for 20 popular shopping cart platforms.

BitPay has a userbase of more than 10,000 merchants in 164 countries. Approximately half of BitPay's merchants are located in North America, "but we've seen growth in the rest of the world and Europe," Krohn says.

About 25% of BitPay's merchants are located in Europe, and BitPay has clients in India, China and other countries as well. "This is the mix we would like to see; we don't want to be heavily domestic," he says.

Consumers and merchants in India want to do business outside of India, but e-commerce merchants outside the country won't take consumer's rupees and e-commerce merchants within the country can't take foreign consumers credit cards, he says.

BitPay gets 90% of its business from online merchants, especially ones selling high-value items such as precious metals and electronics, "things where fraud is prevalent when purchasing with card-not-present," Krohn says.

Because Bitcoin payments do not allow for chargebacks, the digital currency lowers the risk of accepting transactions for these items.

More than $34 million worth of bitcoins has been spent through merchants using BitPay's platform so far this year.

BitPay is one of the few Bitcoin businesses operating in the U.S., whereas many others have stumbled as they face regulatory issues. BitPay received $2 million in seed capital from a group led by Founders Fund, a venture capital firm started by the co-founders of PayPal.

Other Bitcoin businesses, categorized as money services businesses under the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network's virtual currency guidance, have struggled to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance.

Many merchants work with BitPay because it will immediately transfer bitcoins into cash, alleviating merchants' worry of fluctuations in price. In March, after reaching global processing volume of $2 million, the company lowered its fees.