Say a customer signs off on a $2,000 install and pays right there on your tech's phone. At a typical 2.6 percent card rate, roughly $52 of that goes to processing fees before the money ever reaches your bank account.
That's the trade-off behind getting paid on site: the customer pays before the truck leaves, by tapping a card on a reader or paying an invoice pulled up on your tech's phone, instead of you mailing a bill and waiting on a check, and the processor takes its cut immediately in exchange. Card processing for that kind of payment runs in a narrow band across providers, roughly 2.4 to 2.7 percent per transaction plus a small flat fee, based on each provider's own published rate.
This guide breaks the fees down provider by provider, covers the lower-fee bank payment option, and lists what to check before you pick one. Invoicing and payment on the spot is one of the core jobs any field service software for a small shop needs to handle.
Card processing fees, provider by provider
The figures below are each provider's own published rate for accepting a card in person. Jobber also processes on-site card payments; check its own pricing page directly for its current rate, since it isn't repeated here.
| Provider | In-person card rate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Square | 2.6% + 15 cents (Free plan) | Rate drops slightly on Square's paid plans. No hardware purchase is required; Square states payment can be taken through invoicing, payment links, or tap to pay on a phone with no reader at all. |
| Stripe | 2.7% + 5 cents (domestic cards, via Stripe Terminal) | International cards add 1.5%. Card reader hardware runs $59 to $299, plus $10 a month per reader for cellular connectivity if a reader isn't tethered to a phone or tablet. |
| Housecall Pro | Card processing as low as 2.59% | Housecall Pro states bank payments carry a 1% fee. |
The rate itself moves less than a full percentage point across these three. What varies more is what sits around it: whether a reader is required, what it costs, and whether a lower-fee bank payment option exists alongside the card rate.
Bank payments as the lower-fee option
Housecall Pro publishes a flat 1 percent fee for a customer paying from a bank account instead of a card, roughly half its card rate. The trade-off with any bank payment is speed and familiarity: it can take longer to clear, and some customers don't have a bank account linked to pay that way on the spot. Offer it as a second option next to a card, not a replacement for one.
Invoicing from a phone
Your tech finishes the job, pulls up the invoice on a phone or tablet, and the customer pays right there, by card or whatever payment method the invoice offers. That removes the step where you print or mail an invoice and wait days or weeks for a check to arrive, and it removes the follow-up call chasing a payment that never came. The invoice itself should show the job, the parts and labor, and the total, the same way a mailed invoice would, just generated and paid on site instead of after the fact. A copy emailed or texted to the customer at the same time gives them a record without you having to print anything or mail a second copy later.
Taking a deposit
A deposit makes sense any time a job needs materials ordered before work starts, a custom part with a long lead time, or an install big enough that you don't want to carry the full material cost until the job is done. Set the deposit as a fixed amount or a percentage of the estimated job total, collected when the customer approves the estimate, before any material gets ordered. Whichever method you pick, put it in writing on the estimate itself, so the customer sees the deposit amount and what it's for before they approve the work.
What to check before picking a provider
- The published in-person rate, not a rate quoted verbally, since some processors negotiate rates that don't match their own website.
- Whether a reader is required, and what it costs, since some providers let a phone accept a tap payment with no separate hardware.
- Whether a lower-fee bank payment option exists for customers willing to use it.
- How fast the money reaches your bank account, since same-day and multi-day payout schedules both show up in this category.
SpanCrew's invoicing lets a tech pull up the invoice on site and take payment before leaving the driveway, for $99 a month flat with no per-tech pricing, currently in early access.