Number 12 is on 4-weekly at £15, and they pay by standing order on the 1st. Twelve payments a year, £180. You clean the house thirteen times, £195. By Christmas they are one clean behind, and it happens again the year after, and the year after that.
Nobody notices in year one. In year two you have a customer who is sure they pay every month, and a book that says they owe you £30, last year's £15 with this year's £15 sitting on top of it.
That is the quiet fault line under most window cleaning payment methods. The money arriving is the easy part. Getting it to line up with the cleans you actually did is where the evenings go.
Cash is fast to take and expensive to collect
Cash is immediate, accepted by everyone, and costs nothing. It is in your pocket before the pole is back on the roof. That is the whole case for it, and it is not a bad one.
The costs sit on the other side. A float, so you can change a twenty. Banking trips. And the paper book, which is the only record there is, so if it does not get written up the same evening you have nothing to check against when a customer says they paid you in October.
Going back for the money
Then the return visit. Evening collection worked when people were in during the evening. Fewer are. You call at seven, no answer, you call back Thursday, no answer, and now you have driven past the same house three times for £15. One operator worked out that going back for cash was costing him around 20% of turnover once he counted fuel and hours. That is one man's sum rather than a survey, but the shape of it is right for anyone still collecting door to door.
Nobody knows how many UK window cleaners still take cash, there is no credible survey and any figure you see is somebody's impression, but the direction people agree on is not in doubt: fewer customers carry notes, and plenty now expect to tap something.
Bank transfer: free to receive, expensive to match
A bank transfer costs nothing and lands somewhere between minutes and the next working day. One operator puts it at about 95% of what he takes, with cash and the odd cheque making up the rest. For anyone watching fees it is the obvious answer.
The bill arrives on Sunday night, with the statement open next to the round book.
Every problem with transfers is a matching problem:
- They pay £14 because they never registered the rise to £15 in April.
- They miss one, and neither of you spots it for two months.
- There is no reference. Just a first name, or nothing.
- The money comes from an account in a different name. A wife, a joint account, a grown-up son who set it up on his phone.
That last one is the killer, because the payment is not missing, it is unfindable. One operator described a three-month hole in a customer's payments that took real digging to unpick. Time spent, no money recovered, nobody at fault. Which is a different job from chasing someone who genuinely has not paid.
Standing orders pay twelve times for thirteen cleans
A standing order is not a Direct Debit with a friendlier name. It points the other way. The customer sets it up, the customer controls it, it goes out monthly, for a fixed amount, on a fixed date, whether you turned up or not.
Your round does not run monthly. It runs on 4 weeks or 8.
| Cycle | Cleans a year | Monthly payments |
|---|---|---|
| 4-weekly | 13 | 12 |
| 6-weekly | 8.7 | 12 |
| 8-weekly | 6.5 | 12 |
Thirteen against twelve is the one that bites, because it looks like it should work. Fifty-two weeks divided by four is thirteen cleans, and there are only twelve months to pay for them in. At £15 that is £15 short a year, every year, compounding quietly. Those cleans-a-year figures matter whatever you take payment by. Here they are the whole story.
Patching it with £16.25 a month
You can patch it. Thirteen cleans at £15 is £195, so the standing order wants to be £16.25 a month, not £15. Try selling that to a customer who asked what it costs.
And the patch only holds if the year runs perfectly. Lose a fortnight to wind, skip a cycle over Christmas, do twelve cleans instead of thirteen, and the arithmetic inverts. Now the customer has overpaid and you are the one who owes: twelve months at £16.25 is £195 in, twelve cleans at £15 is £180 of work done, so you are holding £15 of theirs. Two years of that and you genuinely cannot say who owes what.
What trips people up here is not admin. The standing order window cleaner problem is arithmetic: a fixed monthly amount can never match a variable count of cleans.
Direct Debit gets pulled by you, and that is the difference
How it works, what it costs a clean, how many customers accept it, and the one rule that keeps it fair.
How the collection works
Direct Debit through a collection service works the other way round. You pull the money, for whatever amount you say, after the work is done. That single reversal is what fixes everything the standing order breaks. Thirteen cleans means thirteen collections. Rained off for a fortnight means no collection.
The timing is predictable: the customer gets notice, collection follows three to five days later, and the money typically lands about a week after the clean.
What a £15 clean costs to collect
A £15 clean costs 42p to collect, all in. That is the figure to carry around.
Here is where it comes from, taken from the trade rather than the sales page. Standard pricing is 1% plus 20p before VAT. On a £15 clean the 1% is 15p, the fixed part is 20p, so the fee is 35p, and 42p once VAT goes on. The percentage is not the story. The 20p is. On jobs of £12 and £15 the fixed part is most of the fee, which is why the all-in rate looks nothing like 1%.
One operator posted his actual invoice: just over £1,000 collected in a month cost him £23.14. Check that against the 35p. £1,000 divided by £15 a clean is about 67 cleans, and 67 times 35p is £23.45. His bill of £23.14 out of £1,000 is 2.3%, so the two land in the same place, which is what you would expect from 1% plus 20p when the average job is £15.
Pricing is tiered now as well, and users have found themselves on 1.2% or 1.4% without asking, which one forum calculation put at an extra 40p per £100 collected. That 40p is the 1.4% tier: 0.4% more than standard, and 0.4% of £100 is 40p. On the 1.2% tier the extra is half that, 20p per £100.
How many customers say yes
Adoption can move fast. One business went from nothing to 40 or 50% of customers within months of offering it, reached 60% and kept climbing, then made it compulsory for anyone new. Another puts the drop-off at under 1% where it is required at signup.
But the resistance is real, and it is front-loaded. Signing up a new customer on it is easy. Moving 300 existing ones is not, and at least one cleaner reports losing work over it. On customer-side forums the objections are plain enough: people do not like giving a business access to their account, and they do not like being told how to pay. The advice they give each other is to find another window cleaner. You can think that is unfair and still have to plan around it.
Collect after the clean, not on a fixed date
One fairness point to get right. If you collect on a fixed monthly schedule you will eventually charge for cleans you did not do, which is the standing order fault wearing a different hat.
So this part is advice rather than a report of what the trade does. Collect after each clean. That is the version of Direct Debit window cleaning rounds should be running on, and it is the only version worth defending at the door.
Where two window cleaning payment methods overlap, the same clean gets paid twice
Double payments almost never come out of nowhere. They come from a customer running on two rails at once.
The standing order that goes out on the 1st, plus the tenner they press into your hand when they catch you at the gate. The reminder you sent that crosses with the transfer they had already done. The clean the wife pays for on Tuesday and the husband pays for again on Friday, from a different account, with a different name on it.
One method per customer
One method per customer. Written down, on their record, and stuck to even when they are standing there with a note in their hand. That is most of it.
Then put the money against the clean it paid for
The rest is where you put the money. Record a payment against the clean it covers, not as a lump on the account, and note the name it arrived under. Then an overpayment is not a disaster, it is a credit sitting against their next clean, and you can tell them so. Money that vanishes into a running total is the thing you cannot unpick later.
Which brings the fee argument down to size. Thirty or forty pence a clean is nothing next to a wasted Thursday evening at a dark house, or an hour with a statement trying to work out who Karen is. The rail you choose matters less than whether the payment lands against the right customer without you doing it by hand.
Card readers and cheques still have a place, a small one
A card reader needs the customer standing in front of you. On a domestic round they usually are not, which makes it the wrong tool for maintenance work and a decent one for one-offs and commercial.
Cheques are on the way out, and the trade's own stories about them involve trouser pockets and washing machines. They have one genuine advantage: the payer's name is printed on the front, so you always know which house it came from. Set against banking trips and the odd bounced one, that is not enough.
Getting it onto the right house
RoundWiz does not collect payments and has no Direct Debit built in. What it does is hold the money against the customer and the clean, so you can see that number 12 is one behind, and the name their transfers arrive under sits on their record.
£7.99 a month or £79.90 a year, VAT included, no per-customer fees, and you can import the spreadsheet you already keep. Have a look at what it records, or start the 30-day trial at app.roundwiz.co.uk/signup. No card needed.