CarpetBossPro Blog — Billing & Payments

Online Payment in the Customer App: Letting Carpet Cleaning Customers Pay Their Own Invoices

Not every customer wants to be charged automatically. Some want to see the bill first. Some pay from a different card each time. Some just like to handle it themselves. For all of them, the best thing you can do is make paying easy, and that means a place they can see the invoice and pay it without calling your office.

The Other Half of Card on File

Automatic charging on completion or on a schedule is covered in Auto-Charge for Carpet Cleaning: Charging on Completion or on a Schedule. Online payment covers everybody else. In CarpetBossPro, customers see their invoices in the customer app and can pay them online.

The customer app is the same place they see today's route on a live map, request service, sign up for plans, see before/after photos and rate and refer. Paying the invoice is just one more thing they can do there.

What the Customer Sees

When a tech taps Complete, the invoice is created from the job. The customer can open the customer app and see:

• The invoice, with each room, piece and add-on as its own line
• Sales tax and the total
• Whether it has been paid
• Before/after photos from the job

They can pay it right there. No phone call, no reading card numbers out loud, no envelope.

Why Photos Next to the Invoice Help

Before/after photos are not a billing feature, but they do a lot of billing work. A customer who opens the app to pay and sees the traffic lane in the hallway before and after is reminded exactly what they are paying for. The value is right there next to the total.

This matters most for jobs where the customer was not home, like a rental, a second home or an office cleaned after hours. The photos are their only look at the work, and the invoice is right beside them.

Paying and Updating the Card

Customers can also update their card in the customer app. That is handy when a card expires or gets replaced, and it means a customer who pays online this time can choose to keep a card on file for next time. Card updates are covered in more detail in Letting Carpet Cleaning Customers Update Their Own Card in the Customer App.

Who Should Pay This Way

Online payment in the customer app is a good fit for:

• First-time customers who are not ready to keep a card on file.
• Customers who want to review the bill before paying.
• Landlords and second-home owners who are not on site.
• Anyone whose automatic charge did not go through and needs to pay with a new card.

Commercial and property accounts on monthly billing get one statement covering every address, which they can review and pay as one bill.

Fewer Calls to the Office

Every payment that happens in the customer app is a phone call that did not happen. The office does not take card numbers over the phone, does not mail paper invoices, and does not have to remember who said they would pay later. Past-due follow-up handles reminders for invoices that sit open, and two-way texting is there for the customer who has a question.

For a small company where the owner is also the office, that time adds up. A week of payments that come in on their own is a week of evenings not spent on the phone.

The customer app helps commercial contacts too. An office manager or property manager can see the work done at their addresses, with the before/after photos on each job, without calling to ask. When their monthly statement arrives, they already know what is on it. That makes approval inside their company faster, which usually means the statement gets paid sooner. For a small carpet cleaning company, being the vendor whose bills are easy to check is a quiet advantage. Bookkeepers remember which vendors send clean, labeled bills and which ones send a total and a phone number. The first kind gets paid without a chase.

Telling Customers About It

Customers will only use the app if they know it exists. A few easy places to mention it:

• On the estimate: “You can view and pay your invoice in our customer app.”
• During the final walk-through: the tech can mention that photos and the invoice will be in the app.
• In reminder texts and emails.

Once customers have used it once, most will go back to it on their own, whether to pay, request their next cleaning or check where the crew is on their service day. To see how online payment fits with the rest of billing, visit the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning invoicing software page.