So how do I pay my Cleaning Company?

 

So you’ve hired a cleaning company to provide you with cleaning services every other week. The only question you have yet to settle is how to pay for the service. You and your spouse both work and will be gone by the time the cleaning lady arrives. So what happens if you both forget to leave a check as requested by the cleaner? What if the service provider only deals in cash? But because of your busy schedule, neither you nor your spouse had the time to get cash and have it ready for the day of service.   Regardless of which cleaning company you decide to do business with, be sure they offer a multitude of payment options, this may save you and your cleaner a lot of headaches.  Let’s go over some of the pros and cons of each payment method.

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Cash is king. Or is it?

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Chances are if you hire a private cleaning person and pay them directly, without a company involved in some way, they will request cash as the form of payment. Why is that? Many sources indicate that a large percentage of the cleaning industry operates “under the table.” We’ll cover that in another article.  Now if you hire a person that operates under a DBA or a company they may not be so quick to accept cash as a form of payment. You see, if an a employee or contractor of a company happens to lose cash during the course of doing business, it is lost for good and insurance generally will not cover these type of incidents. Not to mention the hassle some clients will need to go through every time they need to make a cash payment to the house cleaner. They may need to go to the bank just to get cash out or buy something to get enough change to cover the cleaning fee. In our eyes, accepting cash is risky on the part of the cleaning company and an inefficient use of time on the client’s part. So what other options are available?

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Personal Checks

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A cleaning company is warmer to the idea of getting paid by check versus cash, while the private cleaning person may not. A large percentage of people still write checks. This is the way many people keep track of the money coming in and out on a day to day basis. One reason why a cleaning company may not accept checks as the form of payment is because of the risk of a client writing a bad check with insufficient funds to cover the service fee. Although the chance of this occurring is minimal, if and when it does happen, it can drain a small company out of many hours of time trying to sort out the situation with the client and the bank. The other reason a cleaning company may not accept checks is due to the risk of the check getting damaged or lost. If a check gets lost or damaged, the company will need to invest quite a bit of time reassessing the situation and implementing new check handling procedures, which may or may not be followed by the cleaning crew. In addition, a lost check will need to be replaced and contacting a client to resolve this may be quite awkward, to say the least. We personally take a number of steps to minimize these situations form happening  and in many cases will only accept PayPal as the form for accepting cleaning service payments.  

 

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Online Payments

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Many mobile apps exist to pay people and contractors directly from a mobile device. These apps work well, however most of them are allowed to be used only from peer-peer. In other words if you hire a maid or cleaning contractor and pay them directly, this will work and be within the terms of use of most of these mobile payment apps. These mobile apps, with very few exceptions, are not allowed to be used to make payments to a business. One of the most trusted and used payment processors that allow payments to businesses is PayPal. The advantages of using PayPal for payments by the client are many. Payments can be processed from any device that has internet access. Payments can be made with a number of credit cards, debit card, or an eCheck. The entire process of paying online takes about 1 minute and a digital receipt will be automatically sent to the client as soon as a payment is made. From the cleaning company side, the advantages are equally positive. Clients are given the flexibility of the different payment forms, PayPal uses the latest in payment security and fraud protection, and the payment is received directly to the business account.

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As you can see, the payment method you agree with your cleaning person or cleaning company will depend on many factors. All things being equal, paying online is the most efficient process, offers the most flexibility for payment forms, and is the safest method of all.