How To Bill Lawn Care Customers and Collect Payments

As a lawn care business, deciding on how you bill and collect payments for your customers is an important decision. Making the right choices will save your business money. Most startup lawn care businesses print or handwrite their invoice and drop them off in the mailbox after completing service. As your business grows, you will find that using a lawn care service app that can email your invoices and take payments will make a much better option.

Below, we've listed some of the chief benefits of using lawn care software for billing.

Professional Looking Invoice

With a lawn care service app, your employee can send a professional looking digital invoice from their phone or tablet immediately after completing the job. That means no more sloppy handwriting on your customer's invoice.

Also, some lawn care apps (like Smart Service) have the ability to take payments via a merchant service. You can use these apps to take credit card or check payments in the field. If you can't take a field payment, you can instead email the invoice to the customer, who can make a payment online via a private, secure payment portal.

Convenience

All you need is the customer's email address to send an invoice to your customer using a lawn care service mobile application. These invoices can be sent as soon as the job is completed. And, that's it! You don't need to write up a paper invoice and leave it for the customer, or print and mail anything.

Customers will receive their invoice as soon as the job has been completed. That means they don't need to wait for days for it to arrive in the mail. If you use Smart Service, built-in payment processing allows customers to submit payments securely, at their convenience. Payments then get deposited into your bank account within a few days. This will improve your business cash flow. You don't have to wait to receive the customer's payment in the mail, then take their checks to the bank.

Ease of Use

With Smart Service, the invoice amount will already be set when the job gets scheduled in the office. A mowing job that occurs weekly will have a service item with the quoted amount for the mowing service. After completing the mowing job, you can just select the option to email the invoice. You don't have to remember how much the invoice should be, since the value is saved on Smart Service. Other services (such as mulching) get handled in the same way. The service and material amount will be quoted and added to the job by someone in the office. Your field team just needs to complete the job and email the invoice once they finish. 

Security

In Smart Service, the emailed invoice will contain a secure payment portal for customers to submit payments. The payment portal allows customers to enter credit card and checking account information privately, in their own home. This provides a sense of confidence for your customers that your lawn care business handles and processes payments securely. 

Final Thoughts

You can easily billing customers and collecting payments for your lawn care business with Smart Service. Because Smart Service works as a direct add-on to QuickBooks, all payment and billing information will appear in the accounting software as soon as it passes through Smart Service. This means no double data entry.

Smart Service works with CardConnect for merchant services. CardConnect guarantees cost savings against any existing payment processing provider you might have, so there's really no reason to use anything but Smart Service for lawn care billing and payments. To get started with Smart Service, request a demo today.