Blog · 19 August 2026 · 6 min read

Let Customers Pay How They Want (Without Chasing a Penny)

Ask ten chimney sweeps how they take payment and you'll get ten answers: cash in an envelope on the mantelpiece, a bank transfer that arrives "by Friday, promise", a card machine that costs more per month than it earns, an invoice book with three jobs from last winter still open. Every one of those answers works — until the one customer who doesn't pay, or the evening you spend matching bank statements to a diary.

Booking software has historically made this worse, not better, by forcing one answer: the customer pays by card, online, at the moment of booking, or there's no booking. That suits plenty of businesses. It doesn't suit all of them — and it definitely doesn't suit all customers. The older regular who's paid cash for fifteen years isn't going to type a card number into a website, and telling her she has to is a good way to lose a loyal customer to whoever answers the phone.

So here's the argument of this post: you shouldn't have to choose between getting paid properly and letting customers pay the way they want. The two problems — payment friction and payment chasing — have separate solutions, and software can handle both.

The four ways a sweep gets paid

With We Sweep, a booking can be settled any of four ways, and you decide which of them your business offers:

1. Card at the time of booking. The customer pays online through Stripe when they book, and the job lands in your diary already paid. Best cash flow, zero risk, and the strongest deterrent to no-shows — nobody forgets an appointment they've paid for.
2. Card at the door. The job's done, your technician taps a button, and the customer scans a QR code or gets a payment link — they pay on their own phone before the van leaves. No card machine, no monthly terminal rental.
3. Cash on the day. The oldest payment method in the trade still works. The technician records it in the app in a tap, and the customer gets an emailed receipt — so the cash goes in your pocket and the record goes in the system.
4. Bank transfer. Your account details go out automatically with the job-completed email, and the booking stays flagged as owing until you mark the money in.

The customer sees only the options you've switched on. Card-only business? Fine — that's the setup out of the box. Cash-friendly village round? Switch the others on and the booking form offers them.

The part nobody talks about: the chasing

Flexible payment has a reputation problem among software people, and it's this: the moment you let a job finish unpaid, somebody has to notice, remember and chase it. Traditionally that somebody is you, at 9pm, composing a text that's polite but firm for the third time this month.

That's the half of the problem that actually needed automating:

• Every completed-but-unpaid job sits on one dashboard. Not in your head, not in an invoice book — a list that's always current, because it clears itself when payments are recorded.
• The reminders send themselves. If a job stays unpaid, the customer gets a polite payment reminder at 3 days, again at 7, and again at 14 — each one with a payment link so they can settle it on the spot.
• Receipts send themselves too. The moment a payment is recorded — cash, transfer or card — the customer gets a proper receipt by email. No more "did I pay you for the sweep?" calls in December.
• The books keep themselves as well. Connect Xero, QuickBooks or Sage and every paid job — card, cash or transfer alike — posts into your package as an itemised sales invoice, marked paid against the right account, with full refunds raised as credit notes. That evening matching bank statements to a diary? Gone, at no extra charge.

The awkward conversation is the reason unpaid jobs stay unpaid. Take the awkwardness out — a friendly automated email with a pay-now button — and most of them quietly resolve themselves.

"So what does this cost me?"

The same as everything else on the platform: 2% per booking, no monthly fee. The 2% is the same however the customer pays — a cash job got the same booking, routing, reminders and certificate as a card job, so it pays the same fee. On card payments the fee is collected automatically; on cash and bank-transfer jobs the fees are added up and invoiced once a month, itemised per booking, and only ever after you've actually been paid.

If you're VAT-registered, one more thing worth knowing: the 2% is charged on the net, ex-VAT amount — you don't pay a platform fee on money you're collecting for HMRC. The payments page has the worked example.

Who this is for

If every one of your customers happily pays by card online, you don't need any of this — take payment at booking and enjoy the cash flow. This is for the sweep whose round doesn't look like that: the rural patch where cash is still king, the commercial clients who only do bank transfers, the mixed bag of regulars who each have "their way". You shouldn't have to turn any of them away, and you shouldn't have to run a paper system alongside your software to accommodate them.

One system, four ways to pay, nothing chased by hand. That's the whole pitch.

We Sweep is booking, payment and certification software built for UK chimney sweeps. See how payments and the 2% fee work, or apply in minutes.