Direct Debit for window cleaners: why GoCardless changes the round

Direct Debit changes a window cleaning round because it separates the cleaning from the collecting. You clean, the visit is recorded, and the money is collected from the customer's bank a few days later whether they were in or not. The fee is around 1% of the payment, so roughly 12p on a £12 clean.

That is the whole pitch, and for most rounds it is enough. Below is what it costs, how customers react, what a realistic uptake looks like and how to move a round across without a fight.

Cash means going back. Every round has the customer who is never in, the one who "will do it next time", and the Friday evening that turns into a two-hour drive to collect £60. Bank transfers are better but they depend on the customer remembering, and a busy family forgets three cleans in a row without meaning to.

Direct Debit removes the remembering. The customer sets up a mandate once, online, in a couple of minutes. After each clean the app requests the payment for that visit and the bank does the rest. You stop being a debt collector and go back to being a window cleaner, and the "who owes me" list gets very short. Card payments by pay link, covered in how tradespeople get paid the same day, are the right tool for one-offs; Direct Debit is the right tool for the round.

GoCardless charges a percentage of each payment, around 1% for a small UK business, with a cap per transaction. On a £12 clean that is about 12p; on a £25 detached it is about 25p. Compare that with the fuel and the hour spent collecting, or with the cleans that never get paid at all, and it is the cheapest part of the job. Confirm the current rate on their pricing page before you set your prices.

Do not expect everyone to switch. A realistic round ends up with a large majority on Direct Debit, a few on card pay links, and a handful of older customers who will always want to leave cash under the pot. That is fine. The point is not a perfect round; it is a round where collecting is the exception rather than the Friday.

New customers are the easy win. Offer Direct Debit as the normal way to pay when you quote, with cash as the alternative rather than the default, and most say yes without a second thought. Existing customers move over in waves: when you raise prices, when you send the first tidy invoice, and when they miss a payment and get a polite reminder with a mandate link in it.

In TradeYoke you connect GoCardless once from the Payments settings and it is switched on for the window cleaning module. When you mark a clean done, the invoice is generated and a payment is requested against the customer's mandate. When GoCardless confirms the collection, a webhook settles the invoice in the ledger. There is nothing to reconcile by hand and nothing to re-type into Xero, because the bookkeeping sync pushes both the invoice and the payment.

Customers who do not want a mandate get a pay link by text or email, and a customer portal where they can see everything they owe and pay it. Taking payments online is a Premium feature and the customer portal comes with Ultimate on the pricing page; a round of 200 houses recovers the difference on the first Friday it does not spend collecting. There is a fuller picture of the payments side on the platform page.

Give it three months. By then the mandate link has been in front of every customer four or five times in the normal course of the round, and the ones who were going to switch have switched. The morning who owes me email shows you the ones who have not, and a personal word at the door usually does the rest.