We have a vendor who requires payment in USD, and the quantities are likely to grow reasonably.

The NZD isn't great right now, and I am unsure where it goes. One option we have is to "prepay" what we think we might spend in a year and them deduct the amount owed monthly from our balance.

This would hopefully give us a a bit of a better rate over what we would pay on a credit card, even as a one off, and also allow us to control what the licenses cost us for a while. We stand to be worse off if the exchange rate comes back a bit, but it does at least give us price certainty.

I am not entirely sure how this would work, but do you buy an amount of USD at an agreed rate, and then do the transfer to the vendor as one transaction, or would you buy the forex and then transact separately to the vendor, and are their typically fees around this, we would need to take into account? If the fees for transfer were quite low, then I'd probably pay the vendor in chucks, but if they are high, then I'd probably do it as a single transaction.

How much do forex rates for under 10K USD vary from what I'd pay on my credit card, and if not, then I could skip the fuss and just pay that way, though I expect the rates I'd get to be horribly low.

Thanks for any advice...