American Home Renewal

How American Home Renewal replaced 7%+ variable card fees with 2.9% flat pricing, shifted 95% check volume to instant digital payments, and gave installers a faster way to get paid on $70K+ jobs

2.9%

Flat rate replacing 7%+ variable rates

95%

Of payments now digital

Headquarters

San Francisco Bay Area, California

Industry

Windows, Doors, Siding, and Exterior Remodeling

Employees

35 - 50 across office, production, and installation teams

About the Company

Founded in and family run since 1997, American Home Renewal (AHR) is one of California's most trusted exterior remodelers, completing thousands of full-scale window, siding, and door replacement projects across the Bay Area. They operate on a rare pay-at-completion model, taking zero money upfront on projects often exceeding $70,000 until their customer is completely satisfied. This puts enormous pressure on their payment process to be fast, transparent, and reliable the moment a job is done.

Pain Points

For a company that takes zero money upfront on $70K+ projects, getting paid at job completion isn't optional—it's everything. But American Home Renewal's payment stack made that harder than it needed to be.

Variable Rates and Hidden Costs

American Home Renewal processed cards through Payment Depot, which charged a $500 annual fee plus variable rates ranging from 2.8% to over 7%, depending on card type and month.

No way to Get Paid On-site

Because AHR takes no deposit, final payment needs to be collected immediately upon completion. Installers couldn't accept payments, managers couldn't give field staff access to QuickBooks, and customers increasingly asked for wires or EFT with no fast digital way to collect them.

Check-based Delays

Nearly 95% of homeowners mailed payments after job completion, creating delays, back-and-forth follow-ups, and operational gaps. Customers would forget to mail checks, send them without signatures, or require re-issuance.

Multi-invoice Complexity

A typical AHR project involves base contracts, change orders, permit fees, reductions, add-ons, and inspection adjustments. QuickBooks generates multiple invoices, but sending 3–5 invoices to customers wasn't an option, and syncing issues pushed "garbage" into QuickBooks.

The
Challenge

Before Nickel, AHR’s payment workflow revolved around physical checks. Nearly 95 percent of homeowners mailed payments after the job was completed — creating delays, back-and-forth follow-ups, and operational gaps.

"Half of the time customers forget to mail the check. Or they send it without a signature. Or we need it re-issued."

Keith Hannigan

Production Manager

Credit card payments weren't much better. American Home Renewal processed cards through Payment Depot, which charged a $500 annual fee plus variable rates that ranged anywhere from 2.8 percent to over 7 percent, depending on card type and month. The unpredictability made it nearly impossible to forecast costs.

The bigger issue was timing. Because American Home Renewal takes no deposit, the final payment needs to be collected immediately upon completion. But installers couldn't accept payments in the field. Managers couldn't give field staff access to QuickBooks. And customers increasingly asked for wires or EFT, but there was no fast digital way to collect them.

On top of all that, AHR's project structure made invoicing a nightmare. A typical job involves a base contract, change orders, permit fees, reductions, add-ons, and inspection adjustments. QuickBooks would generate multiple invoices, but sending three to five separate invoices to a homeowner wasn't realistic. And when syncing went wrong, it pushed bad data into QuickBooks that someone had to clean up manually. They needed a payment layer that could combine invoices, hide invoices, and keep everything clean.

The
Solution

After a detailed demo with the CEO and production team, American Home Renewal ran a full test of Nickel Plus — linking their main business bank account, setting up user roles, and enabling both ACH and card options for customers.

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"2.9% flat is better than what I pay most months. For $420 a year, you're cheaper than the rest, we get rid of all the surprises, and the support is unreal. This is crazy good."

Marc Stelzer

CEO

Transparent, Flat Credit Card Pricing

Nickel replaced Payment Depot's unpredictable fee structure with a simple 2.9% flat rate. No variability, no surprises. American Home Renewal can toggle who pays the card fee (the business or the homeowner), and there's no annual platform fee beyond Nickel Plus. The result: they eliminated variable processor rates, the $500 Payment Depot annual fee, and surprise interchange jumps.

A QR-Code Workflow That Installers Can Use

Nickel gave American Home Renewal something they never had before: a way to collect payment the moment a job is done. With a universal payment portal and scannable QR code, installers can now accept ACH or card payments on-site. No QuickBooks access required, no waiting for checks in the mail. Customers consistently choose digital payment now, and the team spends far less time chasing down checks, re-issuing them, or fixing missing signatures.

Cleaner Reconciliation and No QuickBooks Clutter

American Home Renewal's multi-invoice projects used to create a mess in QuickBooks. Nickel solved that by letting them disable QuickBooks sync by default, delete test or duplicate invoices, and prevent job-site payments from polluting their books. When the standard QuickBooks output didn't match their setup, the Nickel team wrote custom code to make it work. That kind of quick response time and near-instant resolution stood out.

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