deposits and payment terms
Deposits and Payment Terms: How to Get Paid On Time
You can wire a board beautifully and still end up out of pocket if the money side isn't sorted before you start. The work is rarely the hard part - getting paid on time is. Here's the short version: take a deposit on anything with real materials cost, stage the big jobs, and put your terms in plain English on every quote. Do that and the awkward chasing-money conversations all but disappear.
Why take a deposit at all
A deposit does two jobs. First, it covers your materials so you're not funding the customer's job out of your own pocket - cable and accessories add up fast. Second, it shows the customer is serious. Someone happy to pay a deposit is far more likely to be a good payer at the end. And if a special-order part is involved, a deposit means you're not swallowing the cost if they change their mind.
How much is reasonable?
There's no fixed rule, but here's roughly how I think about it. These figures are illustrative - set yours to fit the work:
- Small jobs (a day or less): often no deposit, or just enough to cover materials
- Typical domestic jobs: around 25-30% up front rarely raises an eyebrow
- Larger jobs with pricey materials: enough to cover what you're ordering in
Ask for too much and a careful customer gets nervous. Ask for nothing on a big job and you're carrying all the risk. Keep it proportionate and most folk won't blink.
Stage the bigger jobs
For anything that runs more than a few days - a rewire, an extension first fix and second fix - don't wait until the end to get paid. Break it into stages tied to visible milestones so the money comes in as the work goes out. A typical setup: deposit to start, an interim payment on completion of first fix, and the balance on sign-off.
A deposit request you can copy and paste
The trick with asking for money is to make it routine, not awkward. Keep it warm, clear, and give them the exact figure and how to pay. Here's the message I send once a quote's accepted - drop in your own details:
Hi [Name], thanks for confirming the [job] - really pleased to be doing it. To get you booked in and order the materials, I take a deposit of [£amount] ([25%]) up front, with the balance due on completion. Work starts once that's received. Bank transfer is easiest: [Account name] Sort: [00-00-00] Acc: [00000000] Ref: [your name / job] Once it's in I'll confirm your start date of [date]. Any questions, just shout. Cheers, [Your name]
Where new tradies get this wrong
Getting paid is mostly good habits stacked up. Here's where the lessons get learned the hard way:
- Being shy about the deposit. A clear staged-payment line on the quote does the asking for you. Leave it off and you're funding the job and weeding out no time-wasters.
- Vague due dates. 'On completion' on its own is too loose. Give an actual window - 'within 7 days of the invoice date' - or you've nothing firm to chase against.
- Sitting on the invoice. Send it the moment the job's signed off, not days later. The colder the trail, the harder the chase.
Let your terms travel with every quote
This is one place a decent quoting tool earns its keep. Quotato handles integrated milestone and deposit invoicing - you set a deposit or stage payments on the quote and it raises the matching invoices for you, with your standard terms dropped on automatically. No more sending something out with the money side left fuzzy, and no retyping your bank details every job.
Whatever you use, the point is consistency: same clear terms, same deposit ask, every single time. That's what turns getting paid from a worry into a non-event.
Sort your terms before the job and the getting-paid bit looks after itself. If a customer ever turns properly difficult, have a word with your accountant - but nine times out of ten, tidy paperwork is all the protection you need.
Set deposits and milestone invoices on your quotes and get paid on time, automatically.
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