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Payment Nightmare: Should Contractors Require a Deposit Before Starting a Job?
I recently had a job where the customer tried to pay in various formats and payment was never able to go through. I ended up leaving and hoping they would pay at a later date. Thankfully they did pay a few days later. How do others go about this potential issue? I have thought it may be a good idea to require a small deposit to make sure payment is able to be made before the job is started.
What do you do when a customer goes radio silence when their bill is due?
Does anyone have any advice on how to handle a customer who has gone radio silent without paying their bill? We finished the project and had a few punch list items to finish. The homeowner is not returning my calls to schedule the return date and they have an outstanding balance. This is a new issue for us so we feel a little unsure how to proceed. We'd love some ideas!
$100K lesson - What contract language protects contractors when hidden conditions change the scope of a renovation job?
Hey all, first post. I'm Chad, founder of Great Raven Renovations Ltd. We're based on Salt Spring Island, BC, and run renovation, roofing, decks, and structural work across Salt Spring, the Cowichan Valley, and South Nanaimo. Started the company in January 2022 after walking away from a stable off-island job rather than compromise how I wanted to work. Almost four years in now. Has been a hard, useful run. The reason I'm here: most of what I've learned came the expensive way. Over those years I've put well over $140,000 into building this business — and lost more than $100,000 of it. Failed hires who couldn't hold a craftsmanship standard. Clients who exploited weak contract language to underpay or walk on finished work. Each one left a mark. What changed isn't that we got smarter on people — it's that we built a system around the kinds of losses that almost killed the company. A few of the pieces that came directly out of disputes: Hidden-conditions clause in the master contract. Written after a project where opening a wall doubled the real scope and the client refused to acknowledge it. Signed change orders with price and schedule impact before work happens. Written after a job where verbal "just add this" requests turned into three weeks of unpaid labour. Before/during/after photo record on every job, including substrate conditions. Written after a homeowner claimed two months post-completion that something was never done — when in fact it was, and we had nothing to prove it. Completion walkthrough before the final draw is invoiced. Written after a final-payment dispute that should have been a 10-minute conversation on site. One accountable point of contact (me) instead of a rotating dispatcher. Written after we tried it the other way and watched communication fail in real time. None of that came from a course. It came from losses. The process exists because of disputes, not in spite of them. Curious how others here handle this — specifically the hidden-conditions problem. On older island homes we open walls and find things nobody could have priced. What language are you using in your contracts to protect both you and the homeowner when the unknown shows up? Anyone landed on wording that actually holds when a client pushes back? Appreciate the community. Looking forward to learning from you. — Chad Great Raven Renovations Ltd. Salt Spring Island, BCBanking with a Credit Union vs a Large Bank
Your Bank Should Work With You — Not Just Hold Your Money I used Navy Federal for my business for a while. Honestly, it was fine — until it wasn't. Someone got into my account and started sending money out. That's when I found out just how unprepared they were to handle something like that. Every person I talked to had a different answer. No clear process, no consistent protocol — just whoever picked up that day making it up as they went. The security stuff alone was wild. I went in to do a wire transfer and nobody asked for secondary ID. Went back another time — different employee — and suddenly it was required. Which is it? If your own staff doesn't know the rules, the rules aren't actually protecting anyone. Then to top it off, an employee talked me into doing a cashier's check instead of a wire because he said it would be faster. I took it to my new bank and they put a 7-day hold on it. A week of frozen money because someone gave me bad advice. That whole experience made me realize credit unions — at least the ones I've dealt with — are basically just holding your money. And for a personal account, maybe that's enough. For a business, it's not. What Big Banks Actually Offer That Credit Unions Don't After that mess, I looked into Chase and US Bank. The difference in what they offer for business accounts is significant. ACH verification. You can set up filters so only specific, pre-approved companies can pull from your account. If something unexpected tries to come through, it gets blocked. Navy Federal had nothing like this. Check verification (Positive Pay). You upload the checks you've issued. If a check comes through that doesn't match, the bank flags it before it clears. Simple concept, big protection. Wire transfer controls. Large banks have actual multi-step verification for wires — callbacks, dual authorization on large amounts, confirmation steps that make it hard to accidentally send money somewhere wrong. Not "ask for ID sometimes." Business credit. This is a big one. Credit unions tend to have low limits, limited products, and not much flexibility. Big banks have dedicated business credit cards, lines of credit, SBA loans, equipment financing — actual tools to help your business grow. If you ever need capital, a credit union is going to hit a ceiling fast. Online banking built for business. Multiple users with different permission levels, QuickBooks and Xero integrations, real-time alerts, the works. A lot of credit unions are running systems that feel like they were built for a personal savings account. 24/7 support. Something goes wrong Friday night — you need help Friday night. Big banks have business banking lines around the clock. Credit unions are often a Monday morning call back.
How to Calculate Your True Hourly Rate?
Hi all, just wanted to mention that we realized in our first year scraping by that we weren't covering our costs of doing business. Even though we run our business out of our home, we jave insurance and licensing, vehicle expenses etc. That are part of our overhead. Finally we took all those expenses and added them up, divided by the normal number of business hours per month and made sure to build that into our hourly charge. Now we are able to set aside the money we need to come up with every 6 mo ths or annually and don't have to woory about spreading ourselves too thin when the expenses arrive. What are some shifts you made to build a sustainable business?
Invoice update via API
Jobber does not allow invoices to be updated and closed/marked as paid from externally. We use Xero as our main accounting system as it hooks into or bank. Every time we mark an invoice as paid in Xero, we need to manually close the corresponding invoice in Jobber. I have raised this multiple times with Jobber but it is not on their roadmap. Hoping there are more people out there with the same requirement to help boost this post so that Jobber can do something about it. Unless someone has found another way to do it. This will save at 30+ hours a month of man hour to change every invoice.
