Related to the discussion about charging, I thought I would mention the idea of electronic payments for regular gardening and share some of my experiences.
Until this year, I have almost always insisted on payment by cheque from my clients - it seemed to give them some reassurance that I wasn't going to run away with all their cash and for my own peace of mind, I had an auditable trail of income should the Inland revenue come knocking at the door. I would go to a client's garden, do a day's work, leave an invoice for them and then pick up the cheque (often left in a pre-arranged place like the greenhouse) the following week when I was over to continue the work. I would then have to pay the cheque into the bank (for which I would get charged a small fee of around 70p or something) which I often didn't do the same day. Once the cheque was paid in, it would then be 4-5 working days for the cheque to clear. All this meant that I was finally receiving cleared funds somewhere around 2-3 weeks after I had done the day's work in question (I hope you're following me with this one...).
Anyway, earlier this year I decided to ask my clients if they objected to making electronic payment, usually by the internet. Surprisingly, none of them had a problem with it and most of them were reassured that they weren't leaving cheques lying around the place. The way that I work now, I email the client with an invoice usually same day or the day after having done the work. More often than not, they send payment at some point over the weekend and the funds are then cleared into my account by the middle of the week. Great! I had cut the time for payment coming in to a week at most, in some cases even less. This was great for my cashflow and has made things much easier to run.
Now, here's the best thing... APACS (that's the Association of Payment And Clearing Settlement) announced some eight years ago that they were going to try to speed up electronic payments so that they effectively arrived in the payee's account the day after they had left the payer's account. This was supposed to come in earlier this year at the end of May and indeed many banks did confirm that they were ready to make faster payments. The big BUT was that it was going to take some time for the banks to sort themselves out and it was expected that most of the big five (Barclays, Halifax Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Natwest and LLoydsTSB) wouldn't be able to sort the systems out until the Autumn.
Well, I had an email from one of my clients saying that they had made payment yesterday. I was expecting it to arrive in three working days - that would have made it Thursday - and the funds are already showing in my account today.Now I don't know whether that's going to work with all of my clients just yet - it very much depends on who they are banking with, so I will just have to wait to find out.
I'm not sure how many of you will find this useful or interesting but I thought I would mention it as you may find it worthwhile to move onto electronic payments.
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You could even set up regular payments through PayPal, and whilst you pay a fee, there is no requirement to send an invoice yourself, more here:
https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/subscr-intro...
Would be interesting to know if anyone has gone down this route.
I do the work and then send an email invoice. Clients set me up as a recipient and pay as and when I send the invoice.
I sent one earlier this afternoon and three minutes later the client emailed back to say that they had paid by BACS.
It works well for me.