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: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...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!

Hi, I’m Joel, and I run a sprinkler company.I recently contacted Jobber’s customer support team to request the integration of a 3% convenience fee for credit card payments. They said some states don’t allow it, but I don’t think that’s true where I live.For example, my friend runs an HVAC company, and their invoicing software automatically adds the credit card fee when customers choose that payment method. I’ll ask for the name of their software as a comparison.Also, businesses in my area, including the city government, charge this fee. I recently paid my property taxes with a credit card and was charged a 3% convenience fee, so I don’t see how this could be illegal here.This feature would really help. This was my first year using Jobber, and managing this manually during our busy fall season was overwhelming. With four technicians doing 10 blowouts a day (40 invoices daily), I couldn’t keep up. Blowout costs vary, so I had to calculate the 3% fee manually. Eventually, I gave up and just absorbed the fee, which hurt our bottom line.We’re already paying Jobber fees for using their payment system, plus the 3% credit card fee. That adds up. Adding this feature would save time and money while making invoicing more efficient.I hope Jobber considers adding it soon!

We’ve covered these fees for years in our mark-up on each and every project.

Good morning. We ran into this issue immediately after starting Jobber. We are a GC and we Remodel everything for Residential and Commercial. What we do is put all of our quotes as OPTIONAL and make 3 OPTIONS. CASH/CHECK OPTION, CREDIT OPTION, AND FINANCING OPTION. We then Recommend the Cash/Check option so that gets sent out highlighted but also does not get sent with the financing options in the body of the email or text quote. Boom! Your welcome! But I agree, Jobber needs to integrate something where you can put a percentage, and it automatically inputs these options instead of us having to make 3 copies. Rick- El Toro General Contractors Inc.

What we do is work a 3% fee in all estimates and hourly and if the client pays with Credit well it’s covered, But if they don’t it’s a bonus 😜

I do the exact same here. I just assume everyone will pay with a card - and most do!

Chloe

Contributor 3

1 year 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:

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...
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!

33 Replies

BlueSkies
Contributor 3
5 months ago
Payment processing fees are all factored into the cost. either i pay a card company or i have to drive the cash to the bank or deposit the checks. so its factored into every single transaction card or cash makes no difference.

AND
i hate when those fees are added as an add on to the price. and now that im running a business its lazy, there is a stripe calculator https://weareindy.com/stripe-fee-calculator. it will tell you what you need to charge to get what your wanting after the fees. put it in your bottom line price.
D_LHerbier
Contributor 2
4 days ago
Hello, we were actually in the same exact position a couple of years ago. We were trying to figure out the best way to save this money, knowing that jobber does not have a built in option to apply the fee. Your current idea is exactly what we decided to do. We created a non-taxable line item called "credit card processing fee". In the description we explained what this 3% fee was for, and that it only applied to credit card transactions. We found the based process is to put it on all quotes, and also verbally explain the fee during the sales process. There is not a way for Jobber to automatically calculate the fee, so you do need to manually calculate 3% of the subtotal and type in the value. If it is a job that our technicians are creating the invoice and collecting payment in the field, they simply delete this line item on the final invoice before collecting payment. If the scope of work changes onsite, then the technician would either need to update the fee amount themselves, or call into the office to get it adjusted if they need assistance.
This works really well, and we were able to save almost $40,000 the first year we started doing this. What we found is that most people will naturally use a credit card when there is no fee because it is easiest, and maybe they earn credit card points. However, when there is a processing fee, most people will pay with check or cash. We have noticed that we run way less credit card transactions now, and if someone does, it doesn't bother us because our fee is covered. I know other companies will just raise their price to cover this. My opinion on that is if you can raise your price and still make as many sales, then you should be raising your price anyway lol. Why raise the price, make yourselves less competitive, and make the customer pay more, if you are even keeping that additional money? So we choose to lay the option out very clearly, they can choose how they want to pay, it everyone is happy. In our state, you are not allowed to chare a processing fee for debit card transactions to consumers; however there is still a processing fee for us (the company collecting pay) to run the card. So we simply made the decision to not accept debit cards.
Hopefully this was helpful. You should 1000% do this. Feel free to ask me any additional questions that you might have.

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Advice adding the credit card service fee to invoices