The £14 from the clean on the 3rd has not landed. It is the 10th now, you are back on that street in a fortnight, and you have said nothing, because saying something feels rude and £14 is not worth a row.
So you clean again. Then again. By the third visit the debt is £42, and when you raise it at the door it lands like an accusation, because by then it is one.
That is the part to get straight before any of the wording. Chasing window cleaning payments does not sour good customers. Cleaning again while the last one is unpaid does. A polite text on day seven costs you nothing. Forty-two quid and a doorstep row at clean four costs you the customer, and usually the money as well.
Never a fourth clean, whatever else you do
The trade is firm on this, and it is one of the few places the forums do not really argue. You never clean a fourth time unpaid. The genuine debate is only whether you stop at one unpaid clean or two. Nobody credible defends three.
Pick your number and hold it. One keeps your owing list nearly empty. Two gives a bit of grace to people who pay in arrears out of habit. Either is defensible. The drift into four is not, because that is where the money and the customer both go.
Everything below is how you avoid ever getting near it.
When to start chasing window cleaning payments
The timetable first, then how far down it you are likely to get.
The timetable, in days from the clean
Two escalation timetables circulate in the trade and they broadly agree: three messages over about a fortnight, then a decision. Here they are with every step counted in days after the clean.
| Day | What you send |
|---|---|
| Day 7 | First reminder. Soft, blames your own records. Plenty of cleaners go at 48 hours instead, which is day 2. |
| Day 12 | Second message. Firmer, carries a date, offers an easier way to pay. |
| Day 15 | Third message. You have paused them on the round. |
| After day 15 | A knock on the door, or you leave the schedule paused. |
The sums, so you can shift the whole thing if your round runs differently. Start at day 7. The second message is five days later, so 7 plus 5 is day 12. The third is 72 hours after that, which is 3 days, so 12 plus 3 is day 15. That is the two weeks, start to finish.
How often you actually get as far as message three
What surprises people is how rarely you get past day 7. Most debts resolve at the first message. One cleaner's account: he sends the first text fairly often, has reached the second twice, and has never needed a third.
The timetable exists for the two customers a year who go quiet, not the two customers a week who pay a bit late.
Day 7: blame your own records, not the customer
Nine times in ten you are not dealing with a refusal. A window cleaning customer not paying has almost always just forgotten. One trade source puts it at about 90% forgetfulness rather than anything worse. Not a measured figure, but it matches what cleaners report. They meant to transfer it on Sunday, the kids kicked off, it went out of their head.
Write the first message for that person, because that is who it almost always is.
Hi, it's Dave the window cleaner. I've been going through my records and I can't find your payment for the clean on the 3rd. Could you let me know when you paid so I can cross it off?
Nobody is accused of anything. The fault, as far as the message is concerned, is your filing. That hands the customer a face-saving exit: they can say "oh sorry, I'll do it now" without admitting they forgot.
A firm demand gets the money too, some of the time. It also dents a relationship you want to keep for another eight years. The soft opener does not, which is the whole argument for it.
Send it as a text rather than an email. A payment reminder text from a window cleaner gets read standing in the kitchen, next to the phone they bank on.
Day 12: add a date and an easier route
If nothing comes back, the second message gets firmer, gets a deadline, and offers to make paying easier rather than making not paying scarier.
I've had another look and still can't see the payment for the last clean. I'm in your road tomorrow and can pick it up at the door if that's easier, otherwise a transfer in the next 48 hours would sort it.
Note what is not in there. No fee, no warning, no tone. A date and an alternative. Plenty of people who ignore the first one are avoiding the bank app, not you.
Day 15: take them off the round
If that goes quiet as well, the third is the last one you send, and it is not a threat. It is a statement about your schedule.
Still nothing for the clean on the 3rd, so I've taken you off the round for now rather than keep adding to it. Send the £14 across whenever suits and I'll put you straight back on.
That is stronger than anything with the word "action" in it, because it is entirely reasonable and entirely final. You are not punishing anyone. You have stopped doing free work.
Worth one go on paper
Before you write it off, try the letterbox. One cleaner reports a three-week-old debt paid the day after he pushed a printed invoice through the door, having had nothing back from email. Paper on the mat behaves differently from a message on a phone. It sits there.
Most of it is a systems failure, not a bad customer
Long-running non-payment is rarely a bad customer. The diagnosis you see again and again is that customers got used to not paying for months because nobody ever told them when payment was due. One cleaner described a domestic customer who had not paid since March the previous year, despite monthly invoices going out the whole time.
Three habits, all of them before the first clean
-
Do not clean a new customer twice without payment for the first. That is described as a definite standard, and it is the most-cited prevention rule in the trade. The first clean is the one you charged extra for, so it is the worst one to leave hanging.
-
Set the terms out loud at the point where they are saying yes. When payment is due, how you take it, what happens if it does not arrive. Thirty seconds at the doorstep during canvassing saves you every message above.
-
Front-load the payment method at signup. One operator reports under 1% drop-off from requiring Direct Debit of every new customer, so the resistance people brace for at the point of sale mostly does not show up. The honest other half: migrating existing customers onto a new method is a much harder sell, and some do refuse. There is more on how the payment methods actually behave on a domestic round.
If you clean shops as well as houses
This bit is for anyone with commercial work on the round. Skip it if you are purely domestic.
Commercial runs on a different clock. Fourteen-day terms routinely get paid at 30 to 40 days, managing agents are slower than most, and payment inside a fortnight is the good outcome rather than the standard. Chasing a shop at day 7 the way you would chase a house just makes you look new.
The £5 late fee you probably cannot charge
Someone always suggests adding a fiver for late payment. It sounds fair, and on a domestic round it is usually unenforceable.
Run it the other way round instead. Price the job at the full rate, then take £5 off for payment within seven days of the clean. Same £5 gap, but a penalty is something you have to enforce and a discount is something the customer earns. Cleaner legally, and cleaner psychologically.
Why the fee itself will not stick
The rules people are half remembering are the commercial ones. Statutory late payment interest is 8% over the Bank of England base rate, and fixed compensation sums go with it: £40 on debts under £1,000, £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99, £100 at £10,000 and over. All of that applies to business-to-business debts. Not to Mrs Patel at number 12. You cannot normally charge a domestic customer any of it unless your written terms said so in advance and she agreed to them.
I am a software developer, not a solicitor. If you are writing terms, get your own checked.
At some point you take the loss
Eventually the fight costs more than the debt. The trade is consistent on this: the stress is not worth it, and you will earn it back faster with a pole in your hand than you will arguing. A commonly cited example is writing off around £120 rather than chasing it. Divided by the £14 clean at the top of this post, £120 is a bit under nine cleans, which sounds like a lot until you count the weeks you would spend getting it.
Small claims does not survive the maths
Nobody credible recommends small claims for a domestic window cleaning debt. The time and the fee do not survive contact with a £40 balance.
The cost that does not look like bad debt
The real cost is usually collection rather than write-off. Driving back to houses for cash cost one operator about 20% of turnover, fuel and hours together, as the payment methods post goes into. That is bad debt without any actual bad debt in it.
Individual debts of £40 to £120 get discussed constantly, but nobody publishes a reliable figure for window cleaning bad debt as a percentage of UK turnover, so any rate you see quoted is a guess. Track your own owing list and you will at least know your own number.
Knowing who owes you, and since when
The whole timetable above depends on spotting the unpaid clean before you do the next one. A paid/unpaid column in a spreadsheet cannot tell you that. It shows a gap, not how old the gap is or how many cleans have piled on top of it.
RoundWiz keeps the money against the customer, so when their name comes up on tomorrow's list you can see the last clean is still owing before you park the van. £7.99 a month, VAT included, no per-customer fees. It does not send texts or collect Direct Debits; you still write the message yourself, and the wording above is yours to copy. See what it does do, or start a 30-day trial at app.roundwiz.co.uk/signup without a card.