Going to be unpopular but: if you knew the price in advance, you should have had $80 or so and the business should have had at least $10 in small bills/coins.
If you didn’t know ahead of time, and they gave you a price on the spot and you paid at the time, then they should have had the change.
Wise is used to convert currencies, when travelling.
If you can process Visa cards, that is probably your safest option, as Wise accounts come with a Visa card (physical or digital).
Your client can also do a standard bank transfer. They might just need your bank’s IBAN which should be on the bank’s FAQ page or you can call your bank for it. Your account info to deposit will be the same. This will probably be your cheapest option (for you). It costs them a small fee to transfer.
You can also set up your own Wise account for your client to transfer into. Before you get your money you may need to verify your identity. You would transfer to yourself as the client would above.
If they are expecting free cookies: “I’m sorry, I have to prioritise my paying customers. I have to focus on the health of my business”.
Or run through ChatGPT: “I appreciate your understanding. As much as I value our relationship, I need to prioritize my paying customers to ensure the health of my business. I hope you can understand that this is a necessary step for me. If there’s anything specific you’re interested in, I’d be happy to discuss rates and services with you. Thank you for your support.”
On top of the advice here about getting paid, consider changing your contract terms and your processes so that you aren’t caught out like this on the next job.
I set mine up through aws, but its a bit complex if you don’t have the skill/patience to diy.
Google voice might be an option, or some kind of business phone voip supplier
Set up a simple IVR (phone robot) and put your phone number behind that. I just had to make them listen to “Hi, thanks for calling My Business. Push 1 to speak to me” and it wiped most of them out.
There are 3 things I did that helped to reduce my cancellations:
I realised that the number one reason people called me was they wanted to know how much it would cost for us to come out, and when we could come out.
Once you have them on the phone though, its really easy to develop a phone patter like “Our rates are $X Service Call and covers this much labour and $Y labour price after that. We have availability tomorrow, would you like us to book you in?” and before the customer has a chance to think about it, they have an appointment booked. Problem was, they would do exactly as you describe: They rang around others and made other arrangements after they had some time.
By posting our rates online, and making online bookings available, we had a higher number of customers who we answered the top 2 questions for, and wanted us to come out. There were still a small number of customers who would make a booking and make another booking with someone else and conveniently “forget” about the one with us. This is where our Cancellation Policy comes in.
Our Cancellation Policy pretty lets them know that up until a business day before the appointment, if they cancelled our booking they wouldn’t be charged. The less notice we had, then the more we would charge. We sent this out with every confirmation and reminder email (our online booking system helps with automating this). This gives them a “signal” that if they didn’t let us know asap that they wanted to cancel, then it would cost them money. Did we really charge them? No, because we often have customers who will take a “last minute” booking, but the “threat” of a charge lit that fire under their tail not to forget to let us know.