Card Processing in your Carpet Cleaning business
We wouldn’t dream of telling you the way to run your carpet cleaning business, we know nothing about contaminants that are invisible to the naked eye, and nothing about industrial strength cleaning products, but we really do know about Card Processing.
Can Card Processing strengthen your carpet cleaning business?
This is pretty straight forward to answer but it involves a couple of main points. To begin with you will always get customers that want to pay with their debit / credit cards, and I am sure you have perhaps come across this already; if you haven’t then you surely will soon.
Cash has often been used in the carpet cleaning market, indeed in any industrial and commercial cleaning business, nonetheless when you deal in cash you are often putting a great deal of trust in others. You may well have employees who do the carpet cleaning for you, and asking them to be responsible for the receipt of payment carries many risks; they may lose it, or otherwise misappropriate your money.
Another way has often been to distribute bills to consumers after the carpet cleaning job has been completed. This only results in people delaying payments, and sometimes failing to pay at all. This is a terrible way of doing business and it simply doesn’t have to be this way anymore.
Because a carpet cleaning business is always traveling from place to place, providing your staff members with a mobile card processing terminal that can take card payments anywhere in the country with a phone signal is the way you can avoid these issues. Enabling customers to pay there and then when you turn up or when you have completed the work ensures that you will be paid promptly for the services you have provided. Having a mobile credit card processing device also prevents using cash. Anything can happen to your cash in transit from one location to the next; when your staff take cash payments they may accumulate quite a lot of money if they go from job to job without checking in.
Our clients pay me by cheque.
If it is the case, and you have a number of customers who pay for your carpet cleaning services by cheque then you must re-think this kind of payment method fast. Cheques are becoming obsolete, and pretty soon they will no longer be approved or recognised by anyone. Already bankers have ceased issuing cheque guarantees, so now you are at a greater risk of accepting a bouncing cheque.
But Card Processing will require me to pay money?
Yes it will, this is correct, but then business banking is rarely free either is it? The sum you pay for your card processing merchant account to be able to accept card payments will usually be representative of your business and the amount of a risk its. In the carpet cleaning industry there is a low fraud risk because an individual’s customer will be present at the point of sale and they will be using their own credit.
Sometimes card processing merchant rates can also be lowered depending on the amount of time you sign a contract with your card processing company for. Those that sign a 5 year contract with a card processing company can often benefit from much lower rates than those who use their bankers to do the same; the bankers will often increase their rates a couple of times a year too, so this is worth considering.
Do a little research into mobile debit / credit card processing machines, we’re sure that you’ll agree this is the only way forward for your carpet cleaning service; and you can bet that your competitors are perhaps already doing it!
Click to read more articles about Card Processing.
