Deposits and progress billing, done right

Why deposits aren't pushy

Plenty of small trades skip the deposit ask. It feels rude. The customer just met you, they signed off on the work, and you don’t want to make it weird by talking money before you’ve turned a screw.

Without a deposit, though, you’re the bank. You buy the materials, pay the crew, put in three weeks of work, and wait for one payment at the end. That’s a loan. You just didn’t call it one, and you’re loaning to a stranger at zero percent interest.

A deposit isn’t a deposit on trust. It pays for materials and it holds your calendar. Phrase it that way and most customers don’t blink. They’ve paid deposits to their mechanic, their dentist, and the last contractor who replaced their roof. The ones who push back on a reasonable ask are exactly the ones you wanted to know about. They’re either broke, or they’re shopping you against three other quotes and figured a no-deposit guy would be easier to walk away from later.

How much to ask for

Depends on the size of the job and how much of the cost is materials.

Small jobs, under a thousand bucks or so, you can usually skip a deposit if you’ll be on site and done the same day. Not much risk there. Collect at the end and move on.

Medium jobs that run a few days, ask for somewhere in the range of a quarter to a third of the total. Enough to cover materials and the first day or two of labor. The customer feels it’s reasonable. You’re not floating both sides of the deal.

Big jobs, especially anything with custom-ordered materials, you’re looking at roughly forty to fifty percent up front. That’s not greed. The supplier wants the cabinets paid for before they ship them, the HVAC distributor doesn’t release the system without payment. The deposit is the customer’s share of the materials, passed through to the person you have to pay anyway.

If someone balks at a reasonable deposit on a big job, take the signal seriously. They either can’t actually afford the work, or they’ve been burned before and they’re testing whether you’ll fold. You don’t want to be on the hook for forty thousand dollars of cabinets nobody’s paid for.

“Without a deposit, you're the bank. And the customer's interest rate is zero.

Progress billing for the long jobs

On multi-week jobs, one deposit plus one final payment leaves too long a gap. You’re carrying three weeks of labor and materials in the middle, and if anything goes sideways at the end you’ve got a fight on your hands over money that’s already been spent.

Progress billing splits the job into milestones. Each milestone has a price tied to it. You bill when you hit the milestone, not before.

A re-roof might look like this. Around a third up front as the deposit. Roughly thirty percent at tear-off complete. Twenty percent at dry-in. The last piece at punch list, when the homeowner has signed off. The customer never feels the whole number land at once, and you never carry more than a week or two of cost on your back.

Most contractors get the timing wrong: bill at the end of a milestone, not the start. The customer just watched you finish a phase. They saw the work. They’re at peak willingness to pay. Bill before the phase begins and they’re paying for something they haven’t seen yet, which feels different to them even when the math is identical.

Write the milestones into the contract from day one. Trying to introduce progress billing halfway through a job you originally quoted as one number? That conversation goes badly every time it gets had.

Make it easy to say yes

A deposit ask dies when paying is hard. A homeowner who agreed verbally and then has to write a check, find a stamp, and drive to the post office? Half of them never get there. A week goes by, the materials are sitting in your yard, and you’re sending follow-up texts that feel a little more pointed each time.

Three things move the close rate on deposits more than anything else:

• The payment link goes out with the signed quote. Not an hour later, not the next morning. While they're still looking at the screen.
• It works on a phone. That's where most customers will open it, often while they're standing in their own kitchen.
• It takes a card or ACH without making the customer create an account they don't want.

ACH matters more than people think. On a six thousand dollar deposit, card processing fees eat real money. Bank transfer eats almost none. Offer both, default to ACH on anything over a few thousand. The customer rarely cares which one they pick. You care a lot.

One more thing nobody mentions: the receipt. A clean digital receipt with your business name, the project, the deposit amount, and what it actually covers makes the customer feel like they just paid a professional. A hand-scrawled “received $2000” on a notepad does the opposite. The receipt is part of the close, not an afterthought.

Where ToolbagCRM fits

This is the workflow ToolbagCRM was built for. Quote, sign, deposit, schedule, milestone bill, final invoice. One link the customer taps. One workflow you set up once and reuse on every job for the rest of your career.

The deposit comes off the quote total the second the customer signs. Milestones bill against the same job record, with the running balance visible to both sides. ACH and card live on the same link. The receipt is automatic and looks like it came from a real business, because it did.

Founders pricing locks the monthly bill at $99 for your first three months, then $150 for as long as the account stays open. Unlimited users. The office staff watching deposit receipts clear doesn’t add a dollar to your software bill.