Forum Discussion

Chloe's avatar
Chloe
Contributor 2
24 days ago

Advice adding the credit card service fee to invoices

Hello Jobber Community! I'm an operations contractor for a Denver-based tree care company, and I'm hoping to crowdsource some insight...

Does anyone have advice on how to best navigate charging clients for credit card processing fees?

I actually just discovered today that it is not illegal in the state of Colorado (as well as many other states) to add that 2ish% credit card service fee to invoices, and I’m hoping to hear your experiences or strategies.

Currently, Jobber doesn’t have a feature to automatically apply a designated service fee when clients choose to pay with a credit card through the digital invoices we send. This creates a few challenges:

  1. We’d need to ask the client ahead of time how they plan to pay so we can manually add the service fee to their invoice. Totally fine.. except...
  2. If they tell us they want to pay by credit, but decide to pay by debit after they've been invoiced, it creates an administrative mess—we’d have to issue a refund, send a new invoice, reverse transactions in QuickBooks, and add weeks to securing that revenue once and for all. Woof. 

How do you all manage this in your business? Do you:

  • Absorb the cost of credit card fees as a business expense and increase the cost of your services?
  • Offer a “cash discount” instead of a service fee?
  • Use another tool or workaround to handle these situations?

My goal is to make sure we're being as transparent as possible with our clients, continue offering competitive bids, protect our revenue, and keep our administrative overhead as lean as possible. Any advice or insights would be super helpful! Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts!

  • My goal is for Jobber to improve functionality by providing this within the invoicing strategies. It shouldn’t be that hard for the system to automatically apply a percentage increase when a credit card is ran and maybe they can take some of the kickback monies received from Stripe to make it work. Personally, I don’t have time to add 3% individually for the 180 invoices I process per month. Do you think that would be something that would help your organization?