The Problem: Plumbers Finish Jobs and Then Chase Payments for Weeks
Your plumber finishes a boiler install at 6pm on a Friday evening. The customer is happy — heating works, hot water is back on, everyone's relieved. "I'll bank transfer you tomorrow," they say. Your plumber packs up the van and drives home.
Monday comes. No payment. Your office sends a polite email. Wednesday — still nothing. A phone call on Thursday gets a promise: "I'll do it tonight." By the following Monday, your accounts team has spent more time chasing a £1,200 invoice than your plumber spent fitting the boiler.
This is the reality for most plumbing businesses with teams. When you have 6, 8, or 12 plumbers out on jobs every day, payment collection becomes a full-time admin headache. Emergency callouts are the worst — the customer desperately needed you at 9pm, you sent someone out, and now they've conveniently forgotten how urgent it was when the invoice arrives.
The numbers add up fast. If your team of 8 plumbers each completes 3 jobs per day, that's 24 payment collections daily. If even 30% of those turn into a chase, your office is following up on 7 or 8 unpaid jobs every single day. Multiply that across a month, and you're carrying tens of thousands in outstanding payments while still paying your plumbers, buying parts, and keeping the vans on the road.
The core issue isn't that customers don't want to pay — it's that plumbing businesses haven't had a convenient way to collect payment at the point the work is done. Card machines help, but they come with their own problems. Bank transfers rely entirely on the customer following through. And 30-day invoice terms? That's just formalising the problem.
Your Options: How Plumbing Businesses Can Take Payments
Card Machines
Card machines are the traditional answer to taking payments in the field. Your plumber carries a terminal in their toolbag, the customer taps or inserts their card, and the payment goes through on the spot.
For a sole trader or a plumbing business with one or two vans, this works well enough. The problem starts when you scale. A team of 8 plumbers needs 8 card machines. At £20–30 per month per device — before transaction fees — that's £200+ in monthly hardware costs alone. And that assumes they all work reliably.
In practice, card machines in plumbing vans have a hard life. They get rattled around with pipe wrenches and fittings all day. Batteries die halfway through a shift. Mobile signal in basements and boiler cupboards is patchy at best. The Bluetooth connection to the plumber's phone drops out. Your plumber is standing in someone's kitchen, covered in copper filings, trying to restart a card reader while the customer waits.
Then there's the maintenance overhead. Someone in the office has to track which machines are charged, which need replacement, which have firmware updates. When a plumber leaves and a new one starts, there's the device handover, the account setup, the training. It's a surprising amount of admin for something that's meant to simplify payment.
Card machines from providers like SumUp and Zettle offer lower monthly costs (some have no monthly fee at all), but transaction fees are higher — typically 1.69–1.75% per tap. For high-value plumbing jobs like boiler installations, those percentages add up. A £3,000 combi boiler install costs you £45–52 in fees on a single transaction.
Bank Transfers (BACS / Faster Payments)
Bank transfers cost nothing in fees and are straightforward for large amounts. Many plumbing businesses still rely on them, especially for high-value work. The problem, as every plumber knows, is getting the customer to actually do it.
The workflow goes like this: your plumber completes the job, hands over or emails an invoice with your bank details, and then your office waits. The customer has to open their banking app, type in your sort code and account number, enter the amount, add a reference, and confirm. Every step is an opportunity for delay — or for the customer to simply put their phone down and forget.
There's also the reconciliation headache. When payments do come in, they're often missing the job reference, or the customer puts their name slightly differently, or they round the amount. Matching payments to jobs across 8 plumbers' worth of daily work becomes a puzzle your bookkeeper didn't sign up for.
For regular commercial clients who pay on account, bank transfers are fine. For residential customers who you'll see once for an emergency repair? They're unreliable.
Invoice + 30-Day Payment Terms
Sending invoices with 30-day terms is standard practice for commercial plumbing contracts, but it's a cash flow trap for residential and small-job work. You're effectively lending the customer money — paying your plumber's wages, covering the cost of parts, and running the van — while waiting a month to be paid.
For a plumbing business doing 100+ jobs a week, 30-day terms mean you could be carrying £40,000–60,000 in outstanding invoices at any given time. That's money you've earned but can't use. And the dirty secret of "30-day" terms is that many customers treat them as "whenever I get around to it" terms.
Accounting software like Xero and QuickBooks makes invoicing easier, and automatic payment reminders help. But you're still chasing money after the fact, which is fundamentally less efficient than collecting payment when the work is done.
PayPal and Cash App
Some plumbing businesses use PayPal or similar apps to request payments. The advantage is that most customers already have a PayPal account. The disadvantage is the fees — 2.9% plus a fixed fee per transaction is steep for plumbing jobs. On a £2,000 boiler installation, that's £58 in fees.
There's also a professionalism factor. Sending a PayPal.me link from a personal account doesn't project the image of an established plumbing company. And PayPal's buyer protection policies, while great for eBay purchases, can work against service businesses if a customer raises a dispute.
Payment Links
Payment links solve the core problem: your plumber finishes the job and sends the customer a secure payment link right there on the doorstep. The customer taps the link, lands on a branded checkout page, enters their card details, and pays. Your plumber gets instant confirmation on their phone. Job done — literally.
There's no hardware to carry, charge, or maintain. Every plumber in your team can send payment links from their existing phone. Whether you have 2 plumbers or 20, the cost doesn't scale linearly the way card machines do. You pay a percentage per transaction, nothing per plumber.
For plumbing businesses specifically, payment links handle the tricky scenarios well. Need a deposit before ordering a boiler? Send a link for the deposit amount. Multi-day bathroom refit with progress payments? Send a link at each stage. Emergency callout at 10pm? The customer can pay before your plumber even arrives.
How Payment Links Work for Plumbing Businesses
Here's the practical workflow for a plumbing team using payment links.
Scenario 1: Emergency callout. A customer phones your office at 8pm — their boiler has stopped and they have no hot water. Your dispatcher takes the call, creates a payment link for your callout fee (say £95), and texts it to the customer. The customer pays before your plumber even leaves. No more emergency callouts where the customer "forgot their wallet" or "will pay tomorrow."
Scenario 2: Boiler installation deposit. You've quoted £3,200 for a new combi boiler. You need £800 upfront to cover parts. Your office sends a payment link for £800 with a message: "Deposit for boiler installation — once received, we'll order your Worcester Bosch 30i and book your install date." The customer pays from their sofa that evening. You order the boiler the next morning.
Scenario 3: Job completion. Your plumber finishes a bathroom refit. Before packing up the van, they send the final payment link from their phone: "Here's the link for the remaining £1,400. Thanks for choosing [Your Company]." The customer pays while the plumber is still loading tools. No invoice. No chase. No waiting.
Scenario 4: Multi-day jobs. A large re-pipe job runs across three days. At the end of each day, the plumber sends a link for that day's portion. The customer pays in stages, which feels more manageable for them. You maintain cash flow throughout the job rather than waiting for one big payment at the end.
Every payment is tracked in a dashboard that your office can see in real time. You know instantly which jobs have been paid, which links have been sent but not yet paid, and which plumber collected what. No more cross-referencing bank statements with job sheets.
Taking Payments Over the Phone
Plumbing businesses take a lot of phone calls — emergency bookings, quote follow-ups, customers confirming go-ahead on quoted work. Many of these calls are moments where payment should happen but doesn't, because there's no easy way to take a card payment during the conversation.
Traditionally, taking a card payment over the phone means writing down the customer's card number, expiry, and CVV — which is a PCI compliance nightmare. Most plumbing businesses either avoid it entirely or take the risk without realising the liability they're carrying.
Voice Checkout technology solves this properly. During the phone call, the customer is transferred to a secure automated payment line, enters their card details via their keypad, and is connected back to your team once payment is confirmed. Your staff never hear or see the card details, so you're fully PCI compliant without any extra effort.
For plumbing businesses, this is particularly valuable for emergency callout deposits. When someone calls at 9pm because their pipes have burst, you can collect the callout fee during that same phone call. The customer is already motivated to pay — they need a plumber now. Capturing that payment immediately, rather than sending an invoice after the visit, dramatically reduces your unpaid emergency work.
It's also useful for converting quotes. When a customer calls back to say "yes, go ahead with the boiler install," your office can collect the deposit on that same call rather than sending a separate payment request and waiting for the customer to action it.
What to Look For: A Payment Checklist for Plumbing Businesses
Not every payment solution works equally well for plumbing companies. When evaluating your options, here's what matters most for this trade.
- Works without hardware. Your plumbers carry enough gear already. A payment solution that requires a separate device per van adds cost, complexity, and points of failure. Look for something that works from any smartphone.
- Handles deposits and part-payments. Plumbing work often involves deposits for parts (boilers, cylinders, bathroom suites) and staged payments for multi-day jobs. You need the flexibility to request any amount, not just the full invoice total.
- Real-time payment tracking. When your office has 8 plumbers out on jobs, you need a dashboard showing which payments have been sent, which have been paid, and which are outstanding. Matching bank transfers to job sheets manually doesn't scale.
- Instant confirmation for your plumber. Your plumber needs to know the payment went through before they leave the property. A solution that just sends money to your bank account "in 2–3 days" doesn't give them the on-site confidence that the job is fully closed.
- Professional branding. The payment experience should look like it comes from your plumbing company, not from a random third-party. A branded checkout page builds trust and reinforces your business name.
- Low per-transaction fees for high-value jobs. Plumbing jobs can range from £80 service calls to £5,000+ bathroom refits. Make sure the fee structure works for your typical job values. A flat percentage with no monthly device fees usually works best for team-based businesses.
- Phone payment capability. If your office takes bookings and confirms jobs by phone, the ability to collect payment during the call — securely and PCI-compliantly — will recover revenue you're currently losing to "I'll transfer you later."
- Integration with your accounting software. Reconciling payments across multiple plumbers and job types is time-consuming. Look for solutions that sync with Xero, QuickBooks, or whatever your bookkeeper uses, so payments are automatically matched to invoices.
The best payment setup for most plumbing businesses with teams is a combination of payment links for on-site and remote collections, plus voice checkout for phone-based payments. This covers every scenario — from emergency callouts to boiler deposits to final payments on multi-day jobs — without loading your plumbers down with hardware or your office with admin.