A New Way to Get Paid

Lately, I’ve been having problems getting paid for lessons.  I have a pretty clear policy that all my students’ parents signed agreeing that monthly tuition is due at or before the first lesson of the month.  But lately, I’ve had to chase some folks down to get paid.  Up until now, I’ve only accepted cash or check.   I HATE chasing after people for money.   Look, I’m not greedy I just want to get paid so I can focus on teaching my students.

Charging a late fee doesn’t seem to be much of a deterrent.  When I do finally get paid, they forget to pay the late fee and I end up having to chase to collect that fee so I gave that up a long time ago.  I don’t encourage post-dated checks for a year or semester to maintain the flexibility to upsell to longer or more frequent lessons.  I’ve also not had much success with directing them to PayPal, because once the lesson is over, they forget and I’m back to repeating my request for payment again.

A package came in the mail the other day, and I’m hoping it will be the solution to my problem.  It contained a little tiny credit card reader from Square that attaches to my Android phone.  I've heard good things about it from friends who've used it for other things like craft shows.  I have a personal account set up so now when someone says “I forgot my checkbook” I can swipe a credit card.  The device is free and processing fees are minimal.  Most everyone I know carries around a credit card or has a debit card with a Visa or Mastercard logo on it.  And if this doesn’t work, I’m going to change my parent/student contract next year to require everyone to keep a credit card on file with me that I can charge automatically if payment is late.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes.  I suspect I may have some students that just opt to pay by credit card rather than check.  Once I’ve tested it with my current students, I plan to market my studio as accepting credit cards.  It may attract some new students.  At the very least, I’ll hopefully get paid on time with more consistency and without having ruffle feathers by “hounding” my students or their parents for payment.  I can keep the lessons for learning!

If you’re interested in learning more about Square for yourself, you can check them out at https://Squareup.com.  You just need an Android or iPhone to get started.