How to Get Paid by Your First Customer Without Getting Stiffed

The decisions that settle this before the work starts

Find out who is actually paying. The person who books you and the person who releases the money are sometimes two different people — a tenant and a landlord, a manager and an owner, one half of a couple and the other. Get the name of whoever signs off, and get it early, because "I have to check with my husband" arriving after the job is finished is a different conversation from the same sentence arriving before it.

Agree the number, what it covers and when it is due, in one message, before you start. The due date has to be a moment rather than a mood: on the day before I leave, or the Friday after delivery. "When I get paid" is not a date. The scope half of that message is a small craft of its own, and writing down what you will do for a client walks through the four lines it needs.

Money before the work removes the whole problem for the part it covers, with a cost attached to asking, and taking a deposit from a first client weighs that trade. Reading the buyer beforehand does more than any of it, and telling whether a customer is going to pay is the check to run first.

Which payment methods leave you a record and which leave you nothing

Cash leaves nothing at all unless you build the record yourself. Write a receipt on paper with both names, the date, the amount, and one line saying what it was for. Sign it, have them sign it, photograph it before you hand theirs over. Thirty seconds, and it converts cash from a story into a document.

A bank transfer records itself on both sides with a name attached, which is why it is the easiest thing to ask for. Payment apps vary more than people expect. Some are built for sending money to friends and have no dispute process at all; some have a separate business mode. Before you use one, check whether the transaction carries a note field and whether it produces a history you can export.

A check is a record of a promise, not of money — it is money when it clears. Cards need a processor sitting behind them, and free apps that let you accept a card payment covers the options. If you have nowhere for the money to land, sort that first: getting paid with no bank account is the prerequisite for everything here.

One structural rule regardless of method. Never accept more than you are owed and refund the difference, whatever the explanation is. That shape exists because the first payment can be reversed after your refund has gone out.

What to say the day a payment date passes

Send the message that day. Not the next week, not once you have stopped being annoyed.

Keep it short, neutral and free of accusation: "Hi Dave — just checking in on the payment for the fence, which was due Friday. Bank details below in case they got lost. Let me know if there is a problem." Assume it was forgotten, because assuming that costs you nothing and keeps the relationship usable if it turns out to be true.

Send it in writing even if you would ordinarily call. You want the timestamp. If you do call, send a short message afterwards summarizing what was said and what was agreed, which is the only way a phone conversation survives.

The escalation ladder, in order

Go down it a step at a time, and let each step be visibly more serious than the last rather than louder.

1. The neutral reminder on the day. 2. A second message a few days later restating the job, the agreed amount and the original due date, and naming a new date you have set. 3. A phone call, followed by a written summary of the call. 4. Stop any work still outstanding, and hold anything you are entitled to hold — files not yet handed over, a job not yet finished. Do not take back work they have already partly paid for. 5. A final written notice that says plainly what you intend to do next and gives a last date. 6. The formal routes. Small-value claims processes and demand-letter services exist in a lot of places, and the rules, costs and limits are different everywhere. This is not legal advice and none of it is advice about your situation: ask a free local advice service or legal aid line what applies where you live before you spend anything. 7. Write it off, and never work for them again.

What is not on the ladder: turning up at their house repeatedly, posting about them, or threatening anything. Each of those makes payment less likely, not more, and can put you in the wrong.

How to record the job so it is not your word against theirs

Keep one page per job in a notes app, written as you go rather than reconstructed afterwards.

On it: the date you agreed and the exact message it was agreed in, what was agreed, the date you started, the date you finished, photos of the finished work with their timestamps intact, the date payment was due, and every reminder you sent with its date. Nothing clever, no system to maintain.

What that page does is convert a disagreement into a sequence. Two people remembering a conversation differently goes nowhere. A dated list of messages, photographs and a signed receipt is a different kind of object, and it is also the thing any advice service will ask you for first.

When chasing costs more than the job was worth

Your time is the only inventory you have, and hours spent chasing a small unpaid job are hours not spent earning from a paying one.

So price the chase before you commit to it. Count the hours it will take, count what you would earn in those hours doing the work you actually do, and add the part nobody counts — that being owed money sits in your head and makes you worse at everything else. For a genuinely small first job, that arithmetic points at writing it off more often than people want to hear.

If you decide to stop, stop deliberately. Write the loss down as the price of the lesson, name the specific thing that let it happen — no due date, no record, no read on the customer — and change that one thing in how you take the next job. Then block the number and get back to work.