How many of you would......................................................................

[Gino]

Have a potential customer from wa-a-ay outta town wants to do business. I'm in lower pa and he's in new york. He wants me to do a diagnostic test on some signs on his property here in the southeastern part of pa. I agreed, but on the terms we get paid in advance. Over the years, I've had a few people who were a little difficult tracking down to collect the final payments. I don't have the time nor the energy to do that anymore. Do any of you offer deposits with the balance due when completed ??

To add to this, we stopped accepting credit cards about 2 years ago. We'll take checks, but nothing else. For this amount, I don't even want cash.

Gino

 

[JBurton]

For service, we don't really accept deposits, but that's almost exclusively for large out of state sign companies with their novella of a payment agreement.
For new builds, we work with out of state folks all the time, but 1/2 down and remainder due after installation.
Curious why not take a credit card with a 4% markup to cover your costs? I just had service scheduled on my forklift, and they wanted CC info before coming, even if it wasn't our preferred form of payment, presumably for the inevitable non paying customer.

 

[Gino]

We have the same terms.

We dropped the credit card stuff for basically 2 reasons.
Got to a point no one was really using it, then our machine went on the blink and they could fix it properly, so I said fugget. You'd be surprised how many people don't need to use a credit card.

 

[myront]

We get a 50% deposit for large ticket items such as wraps.

 

[Gino]

Agreed. We'll take deposits on anything over $500. However, a site survey/diagnostics for electric signs ?? ope, upfront on that. Once they have the information, they can do whatever they want and I'm not about to chase these people down. Had/have too many things happening right now to act as a bounty hunter on top of it all.

 

[JBurton]

True, but I find it gets the ball rolling on stuff that would instead have to wait for them to stop by with a check. Plus, in this situation, you could theoretically still get paid if the customer disappears, since you have a CC on file.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Accept money, no matter what form. Credit card, ACH, Zelle cash app, Venmo, paypal.. cash. Whatever. Secure diagnostic fee and that gets you a good start build them for the rest or have them paid up front. You need to do what your customers want on terms that fit you

 

[John Miller]

On any client we've never worked with/out of state I tell them what it will cost and get my money up front. "If you don't trust me why are you calling me"