Online booking and payments in DuPage County, IL, and what really happens to the money.

There are four ways to be paid, and the wrong one costs you weekly.

Every trade uses some mixture of these, and the mixture is usually arrived at by accident rather than chosen.

• Paid in full when the booking is made — suits anything short, flat-priced and delivered on the same visit
• A deposit at booking with the balance later — suits anything long, expensive, or easy to walk away from
• A card held on file and charged once the work is finished — suits a route, a repeat visit, or a job whose final figure moves
• An invoice sent afterwards with a link on it — suits a customer who is a business, or a number that depends on what got found

What a deposit is genuinely for.

It is not a punishment and it is not a cash-flow manoeuvre. A deposit is a filter, and it does its filtering before the cost has landed on you rather than afterwards.

The thing being protected is the slot, which is the only inventory a service business has. It cannot be stored, it cannot be marked down later and it cannot be sold to two people. An hour nobody came to is not a missed sale — it is an hour that has already been spent.

So you decide the amount, which services carry one, and how long before the appointment it stops being refundable. All three sit on the page where somebody reads them before booking rather than after missing. The refund window is the part most businesses leave out, and it is the part that keeps a deposit from reading like a trap.

A card on file is how a recurring account stops being a monthly errand.

Weekly accounts, monthly retainers, a maintenance agreement, anything billed on repeat — those are the arrangements that quietly eat an evening a month in reminders, checking and small awkward messages.

Held properly, a card is charged when the work is done, the receipt goes straight out, and nobody has to be asked for anything. The card details themselves stay with the payment processor rather than with you or with us, which is both the correct arrangement and the one that keeps the obligation off your desk.

Two things go wrong with repeat billing and both have plain handling. Cards expire, so the customer hears about it before the failure instead of after it. And charges occasionally decline for reasons that have nothing to do with the person paying, so a failed one lands on a list to be tried again rather than disappearing into a report nobody opens.

The cancellation is not the problem. The silence is.

A cancellation with warning is close to a gift. Somebody told you, the hour is back on the market, and there is still time to do something with it. The expensive version is the one nobody mentions until the appointment time has come and gone.

Two mechanics handle most of it. A cancellation window stated plainly, with whatever charge attaches to a late one written in the same sentence — people accept this everywhere else in their lives and object to it far less than owners expect. And a waiting list, so that when an hour does come free, everybody who wanted that day hears about it by text while it is still worth something to them.

The record does work here too. A customer who has missed three appointments is no longer a memory or a grudge. It is a fact on a screen, and it is the only reasonable basis on which anybody decides to ask that particular person for a deposit next time.

Where the money goes, and when.

Nobody explains this part, so here it is in order. A card is authorized at the moment it is charged, which is the moment the customer sees it leave. It then settles into your own bank account on the payment processor's schedule rather than instantly, and it arrives as a batch covering several transactions instead of one line per sale.

Which is precisely why the attaching matters. When a payout lands on a Thursday you can see which jobs made it, because every payment stayed fastened to the appointment and the customer that produced it. Without that, a batch deposit is a number you accept and cannot explain.

The account is yours. The processor charges its own rate for handling the card, which is a matter between you and them, and we neither add a percentage on top nor take a share of anything you take in. Our bill is the monthly plan figure and nothing besides.

Refunds, disputes and the awkward afternoon.

Sooner or later somebody wants their money back, and how well that goes depends almost entirely on how quickly you can see what happened.

A refund is issued against the original payment, in part or in full, and stays fastened to the same record, so the history reads as one account of events rather than two that contradict each other. If it escalates and the customer disputes the charge with their own bank, what settles it is evidence — the booking, the confirmation that went out, the terms agreed to on the page, the invoice.

Nobody puts that in a brochure. It is one of the better reasons all of this was built as a single system, and you will be grateful for it exactly once, on an afternoon you had not planned for.

What each half costs.

Foundation — $250 a month, and $250 once at the outset — is the site, the email at your own domain, the profile and the local search behind it. Booking that writes to your Google Calendar is Growth work, and so is everything that follows.

Taking money — deposits, cards on file, orders placed online, invoices with a link — belongs to Growth, at $500 a month after a one-time $500, together with the automatic messages and the records all of it writes into. Twelve months paid in advance takes 15 percent off either, so $2,550 or $5,100, with the build charged separately. Both plans run twelve months, and if you want out early, tell us in writing, pay the current month plus one more, and the domain, the Google profile and the customer list leave with you.

There is nothing else on the bill. No transaction fee payable to us, no minimum volume, and no third plan being held back for businesses that happen to take more money than average.