I ran a part time lawn service last year and was paid mostly in cash and cash apps. By the end of the year it was a mess due to growth ended up with 90k revenue.
This coming year I would like to set up seasonal contracts with automatic monthly billing for my clients.
What is an ideal low cost payment service?
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Look into jobber It’s one of the more popular CRM in the industry.
It will do what you need it to do for an LCO of that size and it will scale if you decide to bigger.
Fees are an apart of the business and as long as people know it coming no one cares. Just be upfront with your customers and don’t gouge them. Everyone knows about the 3% and if they complain, fire them. At the size you are at you can replace them with less headaches. Put them all on auto bill and roll in the cashflowStripe is free to set up, invoices/charges your clients automatically based on your specified timelines, can be added to your website, and takes a 3% processing fee.
You can check out square which is what I use. As another poster has mentioned already there’s jobber too. I will probably move onto jobber next year as my business is continuing to grow and might be easier to keep everything organized
Markup your fees accordingly then use a service. I added 6% to all of mine when I started accepting CCard payments.
Wave fees: Credit Cards
- 2.9% + $0.60 USD per transaction
- 3.4% + $0.60 USD per AMEX transaction
Stripe fees: Credit Cards
- 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge
6% is double what it actually costs you to provide the service. If you want to charge me 6% extra to pay for lawn service by credit card, I’m going to the competition.
Check out Wave. That’s what my agency has used since 2012. It’s free, it keeps track of all of your reporting for tax purposes, and your customers can pay online, set up their payments to process automatically on certain dates, or save cards so you can push their payments through. Standard payment processing fees apply, but that’s all you’ll pay unless you want to use it for payroll too. We use it to keep track of our contractors’ payments and then payout a different (free) way.
Just to clarify the other two that are here. Wave is more of an accounting system than just payments. You can track invoices, expenses etc.
Stripe is only for payments.
Both lock you into their processing but for a $90k annual business it should be fine. The only issue you’ll have is when you expand and do $500,000 a year you’ll end up paying way too much and it’s a royal pain to move.
If you want to start on the right track for the future, go with someone like Quickbooks or Xero and BillerGenie. That way you can choose your own processor and always get the best rates available.
Check out a service industry software. Some that I have looked into include Housecall Pro or Jobber. You can do billing and it will help you keep jobs/clients organized.