[Jenny1]

Hi,

We've always accepted cash, cheques, standing orders and bank transfers as payment methods for domestic cleaning.  We've either done the cleaning ourselves or taken other staff members with us.

However, we've expanded recently and taken on a couple of extra staff to work on their own.  I wondered if I should continue to accept cash and cheques as it would mean the staff collecting them and returning them to me.  Do others find that this works out OK?  I notice that some other companies accept payment by standing order only and wondered if I should go down this route.

Thanks,

Jenny

[Adam P]

perhaps not cash as the cleaner could steal it and claim there wasn't any there left for them. you could arrange to pick up the payment say once a month and then at least it can still be cash if customer insists. of course you could have a decent honest cleaner and then cash isn't a problem.

how often do you see the cleaners? if you find you wont be seeing the cleaners for say a month, then them keeping the cheque may not be so good as they could lose them and then you have to tell customer you've lost cheque from 4 weeks ago, can they cancel and leave another etc which could be a pain.

[Jenny1]

Thanks for your reply.

I will be seeing the cleaners at the end of their working day as they will be returning keys etc so perhaps I should see how that works out.

[richywilts]

what a lot of window cleaners use is a stamped addressed envelope i find this works fine for my work but sumtimes you can wait a few weeks after the clean, i use vistaprint who print address labels with my logo and address on saves on petrol costs and time chasing payments

[Joe H]

With my regular domestic cleans, I send an invoice at the end of each month stating the dates and hours spent cleaning.
The client has 10 days to send a cheque OR pay thro the banking system - remember many banks now do fast clearance so you get your money transferred within 24 hours.
Some pay by standing order - same amount every month and they are either up in credit or in debit, bit like their gas/electricity.
NONE pay cash.

I have about 50% on standing order/bank transfer and 50% on cheques.
Recently I tried to get their approval for me to send invoice to their email in pdf format (save stamps/envelopes) and then pay SO/bank transfer.
Only 3 agreed to receive the emailed invoice and 1 of them still pays by cheque.  :

[Jenny1]

Thanks for your replies.

I think I need to re-think things and move away from accepting cash.

[cleaning-team]

Thanks for your replies.

I think I need to re-think things and move away from accepting cash.

Why move away from accepting cash? If you trust your cleaners enough to represent your company and to send into clients homes then surely you trust them enough to collect cash from a customer? When we were doing domestic cleaning about 1/3 of our customers paid cash (1/2 cheque and the others paid either standing order or BACS) - all we did was issue each of our cleaning pairs with a receipt book so they left a receipt for each customer and then each day when they returned to our office with the keys etc to sign them back in we gave the cleaner a receipt for what they gave us so it created an audit trail from customer to cleaner to us.

Try changing your customers payment methods especially in domestic cleaning and you will alienate many and risk losing them - is that worth it?

What we did do towards the end of our domestic days was give all new customers a standing order form so we were encouraging them to pay directly into out account and therefore reducing the levels of cash and especially cheques but a few customers still wanted to pay cash/cheque so we accomodated them.

[Adam P]

out of interest, why did you stop doing domestic?

[cleaning-team]

out of interest, why did you stop doing domestic?

Simply it is not viable to run a business trying to compete against,er, businesses charging £6 an hour and, in the domestic market, thats what we came up against every single day. Add to that most domestic customers have very high (often unrealistic) expectations and expect to pay peanuts for the service and it just was not worth it for the small amounts of profit it generated.

Instead we invested a lot ot time, effort and money into building our commercial business to a level where it made more than the domestic business with little or no hassle and then we walked away from domestic and will happily let other businesses fight amongst themselves for less than minimum wage per hour.

[suffolkclean]

Well said Cleaning Team - we used to do regular domestic cleans too its been over a year we stopped doing it & glad we did

[Lew Lew]

We ask our clients to pay by standing order, and alot of them do. However we accept cash and cheques, and I agree that your staff should be trusted to bring the cash and cheques into the office at the end of the day, if they are trusted to go into your clients houses. I also agree that you dont want to upset the way clients pay as some dont like to be told how to pay.
I find it very interesting that some companies have veered away from domestic cleaning, and believe me I understand why. However we have found that our commercial clients have been alot more troublesome than our domestic clients as they only pay after 30 days, want to pay next to nothing for the cleaning and dont want to pay for more that 2 hours a week.
I would love to know how to make a success of the commercial side, any suggestions?