Win the job. Keep the name.
Finance is how a customer says yes to work they cannot settle in one go. What it leaves you with is better than the job: a customer whose equipment you fitted, on a record you already hold, with something worth servicing every year after it.
Get startedYou have already been asked.
Plenty of tradespeople meet this from the customer's side first. Somebody asks whether they can pay monthly, because they have been offered exactly that on a car and a kitchen and a phone, and the honest answer today is usually no. That is a job decided by what you could not offer rather than by the work you quoted.
With finance in the quote the answer is yes, and the rest of the conversation goes back to being about the work. You are not arranging anything yourself, and you are not the one deciding whether they can have it.
When it comes up
There is no list of jobs this is for. It comes up on work a household cannot settle in one go, which in practice means installations and larger repairs and improvements: a boiler or a full heating system, a roof, an electrical upgrade, a bathroom. Which of them a lending partner will lend on is their rule to set, not ours. What the moments below have in common is not the trade, it is that the work was never in question.
- They ask first
- Somebody wants to know whether they can pay monthly, before you have raised it at all. It is the most common way this starts and the one you cannot prepare for by choosing which jobs to offer it on.
- They go quiet on the total
- Nothing about the work is in dispute. The customer stops at the amount and says they will have a think, and what they are thinking about is where it comes from.
- They ask for the cheaper option
- The repair rather than the replacement, the smaller unit, the part of the job that can be done now. The scope is being cut to fit a number rather than to fit what the property needs.
- It has to be done by a date
- Before winter, before a baby arrives, before a sale completes. The work is not optional and the timing is not either, and the only movable part is when the money has to be there.
- You are quoting against somebody
- Two quotes, one of which comes with a way to pay for it. The trade's own finance providers name comparing installers as the point a glazing or heating job is lost, and it is rarely lost on the work.
- It failed without warning
- A boiler in February, a leak through a ceiling. Nobody budgets for the thing that breaks, and the household that can least absorb it is the one that needs it done today.
You fitted it, so you know it.
- The equipment is yours to know
- You chose it, fitted it and commissioned it. Its age, its model and everything awkward about where it sits are things you know and the next firm would have to find out.
- It wants servicing every year
- Most of what gets financed is equipment with a service interval. That is a plan you can offer on the thing you installed rather than on a stranger's, and it is the same customer, already on your books.
- The history starts with you
- The quote, the job, the finance and the plan sit against one customer, so the service record begins at the installation instead of at whoever they called next.
- They have a reason to stay
- A customer part way through paying for work you did, on a plan that services it, has a relationship with you rather than a number in a drawer.
How the offer runs is a separate subject: where it sits in the quote, who makes the decision, and when the money reaches you for the work you finished.
Full financing details