Deposit for cancellations

Question

I have been trying to figure out a way to collect a deposit in case the client cancels last minute or is a no show. You can collect a deposit for a quote, but not for a regular job or for an online booking. This seems like a very obvious feature that simply doesn't exist. I've tried a workaround - generating an invoice, then changing the line item to "deposit" and then collecting payment from stored CC, but then you have to remember to record that on the invoice once the job is complete. This is a huge hassle and opens up the possibility that I forge to apply the deposit in the final invoice. I don't understand why jobber doesn't allow us to collect a deposit on every job even if it wasn't a quoted job. Anyone know a good workaround?

To jobber support, PLEASE add this as a feature. I was hoping this would be in the spring product update but it wasn't. It just seems like such an obvious thing to have. Many other online booking/scheduling software has this. Why hasn't jobber added this as a feature?

lukee · Answer

Update: After playing around a bit I realized the following:

Rather than collect the deposit up front, I can collect the credit card into up front and add verbiage in my service agreement that says if they cancel last minute or are a no show, then I'll charge their card after the fact. I'd just have to replace the line items on the job with one line item called "cancellation fee" then create an invoice, mark as sent, then collect payment.

It would be great if jobber would write a few lines of code to make this easier, but this seems to be a good workaround.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

julie · Answer

Hi Luke, thanks for sharing this with the community.

I have voiced this to our Success Team so they can pass it along to our Product Team!

We're glad to hear that a workaround was sorted, but curious to hear from other users and their experience.

danjhu · Answer

I just had this happen this week. I lost time collecting materials, taking them to the job site and then returning the materials to the store (3 hrs loss plus no work for the time slot). There doesn't seem to be an easy way to charge for this. Fortunately it has only happened twice to me and they were small jobs.

lukee · Answer

Yeah it’s kinda ridiculous you can only collect a deposit from a quote. Makes no sense. However, what I’ve started doing is collecting a credit card when I book the job. If you click on the clients profile there’s a button on the right hand side where you can text the customer a link to collect the cc info. I have a clause in my service agreement that says if they cancel last minute I can charge them a fee. Every client signs that service agreement before booking the job.&nbsp;

lukee · Answer

You can automate sending a service agreement using zapier and sign now. Email me if you want more info on how to set that up.&nbsp;help@mount-it-atx.com

Forum Discussion

Deposit for cancellations

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