It's the only reliable way of determining who paid you, anyway.

One address per client is a good idea.

Thanks for the responses.

Yes, I was going to give each client who was interested in making Bitcoin payments their own address to send to. Maybe I was reading wrong, but it seemed like it was recommended to generate a new address for each transaction and that's where the confusion came from (as I can think of no way that one address per transaction would be any easier to keep track of than one per client account).

I still have a ways to go convincing the powers that be that this idea is on the up and up - grey area isn't really good enough. It seems like the accusations of money laundering and whatnot haven't really hit Bitcoin, and that if they did it would really only apply to the people operating exchanges, but I still want to make sure I don't open us up to any legal issues as we don't have the time/resources to deal with them. Perhaps I'm being paranoid in the non-traditional sense.

So far I feel like if we only accept Bitcoin for accounts who we have legitimate account information for, and who have already made at least one "traditional" payment, then we can't really be accused of doing anything grey-area. It probably goes against the philosophy of Bitcoin by being reliant on other payment methods, but until I've sought legal advice I only really want to dip my toes in, so to speak.

Edit: Wish I'd seen this thread first, now I look like a chump.

I don't think so always - it depends on the product. You wouldn't sell a cash firearm anonymously if you were a merchant (in my home state, private parties do a lot), and if you were you would give some serious thought as to the "look" of the person beforehand. You certainly wouldn't sell to someone who came across as looking like they were about to go on a shooting rampage, for fear of legal repercussions.

In our case we have certain obligations to meet to ensure the minimal amount of headache in case anything bad happens. If someone does happen to buy a VOIP server and use it for say "terrorism", and the powers that be come a-knocking with a warrant, I want something to turn over so I don't look complicit.

For most customers (gamers, typically) these aren't concerns - they almost certainly aren't doing anything to warrant attention from law enforcement and because of a reasonable privacy policy they're happy to hand over at least some details and make a payment via Paypal or a credit card. I want to keep things as they are, and just accept Bitcoins as an alternate payment (at this point we're figuring on probably blowing it all on advertising and claim them as barter income for the current exchange rate in USD).

I posted a "proposal" on our Facebook page, which I would appreciate if anyone can look at and point out anything that's a) unreasonable or b) factually inaccurate. If it all looks good I'll put a page up on our main website about it, and then if there's a non-trivial amount of interest I'll look at integrating Bitcoin into our billing system so it's automated.