5 Ways Stove Installers Can Get Paid Faster (Without Chasing Customers)

Busy season is good news and bad news at the same time. The diary fills up, which is what you want - but for a lot of installers, the gap between "job finished" and "money in the account" quietly stretches out, because there's no time between jobs to chase anyone. By January, that gap has usually turned into a pile of overdue invoices you meant to deal with in October.

None of this requires becoming a different kind of business. A handful of structural changes make the biggest difference.

1. Take a deposit, every time, without exception

If you're not already taking a deposit on booking, this is the single highest-leverage change available. A deposit does two things: it covers your material costs upfront so a cancelled job doesn't leave you out of pocket for a stove you've already ordered, and it filters out the tyre-kickers who were never serious about going ahead. A standard structure - say 25-30% on booking, balance on completion - is common in the trade and rarely raises an eyebrow from a genuine customer.

2. Invoice on the day, not "when you get a chance"

The single biggest predictor of a slow-paying invoice is a slow-sent invoice. If the invoice goes out a week (or three) after the job's done, you've lost the moment when the customer is happiest - fresh install, working stove, good impression - and replaced it with a moment when the job's already faded from their mind and the invoice feels like an unwelcome surprise. Invoicing on-site or the same evening, while the job is still front of mind for both of you, consistently gets paid faster.

3. Make the payment method genuinely easy

A customer who has to find your bank details in an old email, manually type a sort code and account number, and remember to actually do it later is a customer who's more likely to forget or delay. A clear payment link on the invoice, or a card payment option on-site, removes the friction that turns "I'll do it tonight" into "I'll do it this weekend" into an invoice that's three weeks overdue.

4. Set a real follow-up schedule, and stick to it

Chasing payment feels awkward, so a lot of installers put it off until it's genuinely uncomfortable - which is exactly the wrong order. A polite, consistent structure removes the awkwardness because it's not personal, it's just what happens:

• On the due date: a friendly reminder, assuming good faith — people do genuinely forget.

• 7 days overdue: a clearer follow-up referencing the original invoice and due date.

• 14+ days overdue: a firmer message, and a decision point on whether future work for that customer requires payment upfront.

The point of having the schedule is that you're not deciding in the moment whether to chase - you already decided, back when you weren't annoyed about it.

5. Don't let "mates' rates" and repeat customers skip the process

The invoices that go unpaid longest are often for the customers you know best - the ones where formal terms feel unnecessary because you trust them. That trust is usually well placed, but it's exactly why the invoice slips down both of your priority lists. Keep the same deposit and invoicing structure for everyone, and the awkward chase becomes far less likely to be needed in the first place.

Seeing where the gaps actually are

Most installers don't have a payment problem with every job - they have a payment problem with the two or three jobs each month that slip through without a deposit, get invoiced late, or never get a follow-up because nobody was tracking that they'd gone quiet. The fix isn't more effort, it's better visibility into which jobs are sitting where.

That's the problem BurnerCRM is built to solve - every job shows its status at a glance, from quoted through to invoiced and paid, so nothing slips through simply because nobody happened to look at it that week.