Quote:
Originally Posted by frostfree  I always take a 30% deposit on any work over £500. Remember many people are in a bad way with their finances. A couple of customers have tried it on over the last six months, the usual excuses, cant find the cheque book, can I pay you next month, there was £30,000 in that account I cant understand why the cheque has bounced? People can be solvent one week and heading for bankruptcy the next week. I would recommend taking a deposit as this covers you for your materials and weeds out any dreamers!
Cover yourselves, you dont want a couple of bad debts to ruin your business. Your in business to make money, not to offer customers a credit facility while they take their time to pay. You have to pay for most other goods and services upfront why not tradespeople? They dont let you take your supermarket shopping home and pay for it when you've eaten it all and decided it tasted OK!! |
I totally agree.
Not everyone who works for themselves can afford to layout hundreds on materials if it's a big domestic job and wait for payment until the end of the job.
If I do a large job then I will ask for some form of payment to cover some of the materials upfront as I have bills to pay just like the customers do, but for smaller jobs like kitchen floors or a bathroom then I don't bother if it's straight forward.
But if your doing 30 sqm of hardi backer boarding out, 12 bags of adhesive plus bottles of admix along with bottles of sealer and so on then you can be talking quite a lot of money, so then I will say from the start I need the customer to either buy xyz in or pay me for it and I pick it all up before starting.
ohh, and that's some terrible tiling too
