The Problem
Waiting on the mail, and sometimes it getting lost
Behind Seattle Concrete Core Drilling’s field crews is an office of one. Megan Schloer, the company’s Office and Operations Manager, runs dispatch and the entire back office, which means every invoice and every payment that comes in passes through her.
For years, getting paid meant waiting on the mail. Customers either sent a check or initiated an ACH transfer through their own systems, and the company had no way to accept an ACH payment on its own end. Checks arrived when they arrived, and sometimes they didn’t arrive at all.
Payments took a long time to receive via mail. We had several checks get lost or stolen in the mail, which took an extensive amount of time to file police reports and fraud claims with the bank.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
The available alternative wasn’t much better. The company’s QuickBooks Desktop setup offered an online payments option, but it was expensive and difficult to use. Meanwhile a steady segment of customers wanted to pay by card, mostly one-time homeowners who hire a drilling crew once and never again. That was an option Megan couldn’t offer without giving up margin, since QuickBooks charged 1% to receive a payment on an invoice and nearly 3% on card payments, with no way to pass that cost to the person paying.
QuickBooks is heavily pushed on small businesses, but the high fees feel like a scam.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
For a company of fewer than ten people protecting already thin margins, absorbing those fees to collect money it had already earned wasn’t sustainable.
The Solution
A payment link in three places
Megan found Nickel the way a lot of small business owners find tools that actually work, which is to say from someone else who runs one.
Nickel was recommended to me on the r/smallbusiness subreddit. We needed a way to accept ACH payments without fees and also wanted the option for our customers to pay by card, where the card processing fee is paid by the payer, rather than coming out of our already low profit margins.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
As the only person in the office, she had a short list of requirements. Low risk. Little to nothing up front. Simple enough to set up and use without help. Nickel met all three, and the fee structure did the rest: ACH payments process for free, and the card processing fee can be passed to whoever chooses to pay by card rather than absorbed by the business. That combination is what lets the company keep offering a 2% discount to customers who pay within fifteen days, instead of watching the discount get swallowed by processing costs.
Today the company invoices through QuickBooks Online and sends the invoice by email or mail. The payment link lives in three places: on the invoice itself, in the email, and on the company’s website. Customers can pay the full amount, pay several invoices at once, or take the early payment discount, all without a back and forth.
The website link was Megan’s own idea, added through the site builder after one too many of the same email.
I added this ‘Pay Now’ button because I would often get emails asking how we preferred to be paid, even though it is listed both on the invoice and in the email. Many people would rather not interact with a human person at all and appreciate having online options, so adding the link removed the need for the customer to reach out.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
For the customers who use it, mostly homeowners and smaller companies, payment now arrives almost as soon as the invoice does, rather than the 5 to 7 days a mailed check took to clear, and closer to 10 around the holidays. Megan credits a mix of reasons: fewer people keep checks anymore, ACH costs them nothing, and paying by card comes with consumer protections and cashback. The online option also changed who could capture the early payment discount. Rather than waiting for a weekly check run, a smaller company can pay the moment an invoice lands, comfortably inside the fifteen day window.
The bigger difference shows up in what the company no longer pays to collect.
Nickel has easily saved us around $10,000 per year by offering free ACH payments and letting us pass the card fee to the customer. QuickBooks Online charged a 1% fee to receive payment on invoices and also charged 2.99% for card payments, with no option to pass the cost on to the customer.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
The time savings are quieter but real. Faster payment from homeowners and smaller companies means fewer statements to send and fewer reminders to chase, which matters when the accounts receivable department is one person who also runs dispatch. There are no minimums either, so the cost stays the same whether Megan runs payments daily or twice a month.
Asked what she would tell another small construction or trade business still chasing checks:
Nickel offers unlimited free ACH payments with no strings attached. You can cover card fees or pass them to the customer. You can use Nickel alongside other payment services. It lets a customer pay any amount on an invoice, and multiple invoices at once, so there’s no need to revise and resend an invoice. It saves a lot of time for both the company and the customer. I would highly recommend looking into Nickel to see if it’s right for you.
Megan Schloer, Office and Operations Manager
