Getting paid on site, before you leave

Ask a trade business where its cashflow problem is and the answer is usually customers. Look at the dates and it is usually the fortnight between the job finishing and the invoice going out.

That fortnight is not a customer problem. It is the gap between the work ending and somebody at a desk getting to the paperwork, and every day in it is a day the money was never asked for.

Three gaps, not one

1. Done to invoiced. The job finished on Tuesday and the invoice went out a week on Friday.
2. Invoiced to paid. The customer has it, and now you are waiting on their habits.
3. Paid to noticed. The money arrived and nobody reconciled it, so you chased somebody who had already paid.

The second gap gets all the attention, because it feels like somebody else's fault. The first is bigger in most trade businesses and is entirely yours, which also makes it the one you can fix this week.

Close the first gap by moving the invoice to the van

The invoice should be raised where the job ends, on the phone, by the person who did the work. Not because a phone is a better tool for typing, but because the details are only complete at that moment: what was actually done, the parts actually used, the extra the customer asked for on the day.

An invoice written on Friday from a job sheet is a reconstruction. It is missing the second powerpoint and the extra hour, and those go unbilled, which is a different leak in the same pipe.

Then take the money while you are still there

Once the invoice exists on the phone, the shortest possible version of the second gap is zero: the customer pays before you drive away.

In the Diract phone app, open the invoice and tap Tap to Pay on iPhone, or Tap to Pay on Android, beside Record payment. It takes what is owed. Hand the customer the phone or hold it out, and they tap their card or their own phone against the top of it.

No terminal, no second device, no card reader to charge and lose. The money goes to your own Stripe account, and the payment is recorded on the invoice as Card with the reference Paid by Tap to Pay, so it is already reconciled by the time you are back in the van.

That last part closes the third gap as well. The payment and the invoice were never separate records that somebody had to match up later.

What to set up first

Card payments have to exist before any of this shows. An admin clicks Admin, then Billing, and Set up card payments under Getting paid, fills in the form and continues to Stripe. Until that is done, a customer sees only your How to pay details.

On the phone, allow location access the first time, because Stripe needs it to take a card in person. On an iPhone, whoever set up card payments accepts Apple's Tap to Pay terms once. The first payment on a given phone takes a few seconds longer while it gets ready, which is worth knowing before you are standing in front of a customer wondering if it has frozen.

Finalise the invoice and save any changes before taking payment. And if the phone loses signal after the card is charged, the payment is recorded as soon as Stripe confirms it, so a dead spot at the back of a property does not lose the transaction.

When you cannot be paid on the spot

Plenty of work is not paid on the day: builder contracts, commercial accounts, anything on terms. Those need the other route, which is a link the customer can pay from.

Share link finalises the invoice and copies a link that needs no account at the customer's end. Their page shows the lines, what has been paid, the Amount due, a Download PDF and a button such as Pay $230.00 by card. The box tells you Not opened yet until they open it, which is a quietly useful thing to know before you ring to chase.

Set the reminders once and stop chasing by hand: Invoice settings on the Invoices list takes Remind before due (days) and Remind when overdue by (days). Reminders stop on their own once the invoice is paid or voided.

The job moves with the invoice

An invoice raised from a job moves the job along by itself. Once it is finalised the job's status becomes Invoiced, with its invoice date and payment due date filled in, and once nothing is owed it becomes Paid. Remove a payment and the job goes back to Invoiced.

That is what makes "done, not invoiced" a number you can put on a screen rather than a feeling. It is the quietest leak in any trade business, and it is only visible when the job and the invoice are the same thread. Job tracking for a trade business covers the rest of that thread, and trade invoicing and cashflow covers the money side.

The change worth making first

• Set card payments up once, so every route to being paid is open
• Raise the invoice at the job, from the phone, while the detail is still in front of you
• Ask for payment on the spot for domestic work. Most people will pay if asked, and almost nobody is asked
• Use the link and the automatic reminders for anybody on terms
• Put dollars not yet invoiced on a screen somebody reads daily