How our payments actually work
We have a standard terms and conditions page, but I know most people just tick the box without reading it. Fair enough. But I get enough questions about how our payments work that I wanted to write something in plain English, directly from me.
If you’re an ongoing client who’s never wondered about this, I love that for you. Keep on keeping on. But for potential new clients who are curious, ongoing clients who want clarity on the latest policy, and the occasional scammer trying to figure out how easily they can get one over on us: here’s the full breakdown.
-
For first-time clients, we require a 50% deposit to book your clean.
If we’ve serviced you within the past 12 months and you paid on time, we typically won’t require a deposit going forward. The only exception is if you’ve cancelled 3 or more times within a rolling 90-day period. At that point, we go back to requiring a deposit.
The deposit exists for two reasons.
First, it tells us you’re serious. We get a lot of quote requests from people who want to know our soonest available date but never actually book. Once someone puts money down, we know it’s real and we can block off our technicians’ schedules. It’s basically our way of confirming “yes, this is a real job and not just someone shopping around.”
Second, it protects us when someone reschedules or cancels. But we don’t just pocket the whole deposit if plans change. Keep reading.
-
Life happens. People get sick (or more often, their kids get sick). Family emergencies come up. Sometimes the client just couldn’t get the clutter picked up in time and would rather reschedule than let us see the mess. We get it.
If you give us reasonable notice and we can find another available time, 9 times out of 10 we won’t take anything out of the deposit. We’ll just reschedule. Honestly, we’re often happy about cancellations because it lets our techs knock out a job from our commercial waitlist that we’ve been trying to squeeze in all month.
We send plenty of reminders. You’ll get a text three days before, welcome emails explaining the process, a text the night before, and a text when the technician is on the way. Unless you’ve opted out of all communication from us, nobody can say they didn’t know we were coming.
-
If you cancel when our technician is already at your doorstep, we do need to withhold the amount it cost us to send them to you.
Here’s a real example. Say you have a one-tech job. The technician sends the “On My Way” text, drives to your home, unloads all their supplies and equipment, walks up to your front door, and knocks. They wait five minutes. Then you call the office and say you need to reschedule.
That’s 5 minutes waiting, plus about 15 minutes of drive time, plus 5 minutes unloading. About 30 minutes total that we paid a technician who wasn’t able to do the job.
For anyone who wants the actual math: our lowest technician pay rate is $22/hour. After the company’s payroll taxes and expenses, the loaded rate is $26/hour. Half an hour of that is $13 in direct labor cost. Per our bookkeeper, wages need to represent 40% of total job value for us to stay financially healthy, so the actual cost of that 30-minute cancellation to the company is $32.50. That amount would show up as a line item on your rescheduled invoice.
Most of the time this doesn’t come up. People know ahead of time and cancel with enough notice that no one is sitting outside a locked door.
-
Where things get serious is when someone repeatedly reschedules big jobs and leaves our technicians sitting for extended periods.
We created a policy after this happened enough times. We had situations where 2 or more technicians showed up for a clean that was supposed to take half their day, and the client didn’t let them in for over an hour. That’s a lot of lost revenue.
If you’ve left our technicians sitting more than once, we’re going to hold more of your deposit each time. We’ve had one property management company reschedule after leaving our techs waiting so many times that we had to hold their entire deposit. They chose not to continue working with us after that, which I understand when the deposit was almost $500. But they’d cost the company well over that amount doing it to us repeatedly.
-
Once you’re an established client, we don’t require anything up front. Your payment is due upon completion of your clean, same day.
We do require a card on file. If you haven’t paid your invoice within 3 days of your clean being completed, the office will charge the card on file. A lot of our clients actually prefer this. They like the hands-off nature of the whole thing: auto-scheduling, the tech shows up and gets the work done, the invoice comes and goes without them having to think about it. If you’d rather handle payment yourself each time, just let the office know and we’ll hold off as long as invoices are paid on time.
-
There are rare situations where we’ll require the full quote amount before we start the clean. This is usually a first-time client who describes the home as being well below standard, and we have concerns about whether we’ll actually receive payment after the work is done.
In five years of business, almost every time someone hasn’t paid us, it’s been a first-time client with a below-standard home. I’m not drawing conclusions. I’m just saying this part of the policy wrote itself.
