Taking payments on the job, before you drive away.

Why afterwards is expensive

An invoice sent later is a decision you have handed to the customer at the moment they are least motivated: the problem is solved and the van has gone.

Most people pay. The cost is in the minority who do not, and in what chasing them consumes: the reminder, the second reminder, the awkward call, and the small percentage that is simply never recovered. For a one-van operation that admin lands on the person who also fitted the tyres.

Taking payments on the job removes the whole category. The customer is present, satisfied, and has just watched the work happen, which is the easiest moment to ask that will ever exist.

What actually works on a driveway

The practical constraints are signal, weather, and doing it in under a minute while holding a phone with cold hands.

• Card on a phone or a small reader, which covers most customers and settles quickly.
• A payment link sent by message, useful when the customer is not the person with the car.
• Bank transfer, which is fine when you can confirm it has arrived rather than being shown a screen.
• Cash, which still has a place and creates its own reconciliation and safety questions.
• Stored details for account and fleet customers, where the terms were agreed in advance.

The one to be careful with is a transfer you have only seen on someone else's phone. A pending screen is not an arrival, and the difference has cost plenty of people a job.

Quote it so payment is not a surprise

Most awkwardness at payment traces back to the booking rather than the moment itself.

A customer told the fitted price up front, including everything, expects to pay that figure and reaches for a card without prompting. One who was quoted a tyre price and then presented with fitting, valve, balance and disposal on top is having a different conversation, and that is when payment becomes negotiation.

Saying when payment is expected is part of the quote too. On completion is a normal term and it only feels abrupt if it arrives at the end unannounced.

Deposits for the jobs that justify them

A mobile operation carries a specific risk: driving to a job and finding nobody home, or a customer who has changed their mind.

A deposit at booking removes most of that, and it is most defensible where you have bought stock specifically for the job. On a common size held on the van it is harder to justify and it costs you bookings, so the honest split is by whether the stock was bought for that customer.

Where you do take one, say what happens to it if they cancel, before they pay it. A deposit whose terms are explained is accepted; one explained afterwards is a complaint.

Reconcile the same day

Payments taken on the job are easy to take and easy to lose track of, particularly across a week with several drivers.

The failure is not usually theft, it is a job marked complete with no payment recorded against it, which is indistinguishable from an unpaid job when you look a month later. Multiply that by a few a week and the accounts stop reflecting reality.

Matching payments to jobs the same day, rather than at month end, is what keeps that honest. It is also the only way to notice a pattern early rather than discovering a hole in the quarter.

Account customers are a different agreement

Trade, fleet and repeat business customers reasonably expect terms, and that is a legitimate exception rather than a failure of process.

What matters is that it is an agreement rather than a drift: agreed in advance, with a limit, terms in writing, and a check on the ageing rather than the total. A customer who pays reliably at sixty days is fine; one whose balance grows every month is a risk that will not announce itself.

The distinction worth holding is that terms are extended deliberately to customers who have earned them, and everyone else pays on the job. Letting that boundary blur is how a mobile business ends up funding its customers.