Do you want to take payment on your phone?

For a long time taking a card meant owning a card machine. You bought it or rented it, you charged it, you remembered it, and when you forgot it you either lost the payment or took a bank transfer and hoped.

That is no longer the only option. A modern phone can accept a contactless card or a phone directly, with no extra hardware at all, and for a mobile business it removes an entire category of problem.

What it actually is

The two schemes are Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android. The customer holds their card or their own phone against the back of yours. It is the same contactless payment they make in a supermarket, using the same networks and the same limits, and it works the same way whether they tap a physical card, a phone or a watch.

There is no reader to buy, nothing to charge separately and nothing to leave on the kitchen table. If you have your phone you can take money.

What it costs against a card machine

A card machine has three costs and most people only count one. There is the transaction rate, there is the hardware, bought outright or rented monthly, and there is the cost of the times you did not have it with you.

The third one is invisible and usually the largest. A mobile therapist who takes three bank transfers a month because the reader was flat is not paying a hardware cost, they are paying a chasing cost, and some of those transfers arrive late or not at all.

On the transaction rate itself, phone based contactless is generally in the same range as a small business card machine rather than dramatically cheaper. Anyone telling you it is free is describing something else. Youzse charges 2.5% plus 35p, and the platform fee sits inside that figure rather than being added on top.

Worth reading the rate properly. Card fees are a percentage plus a fixed amount, and on small tickets the fixed amount is what decides the real cost. A £9 add-on and a £400 repair on the same rate are not paying anything like the same proportion.

Where it genuinely does not fit

Three situations where a phone is the wrong answer and it is better to say so.

• A high volume counter. A barber shop doing sixty walk-ins on a Saturday wants a machine sitting on the desk that anyone can use, not the owner's phone being passed around.
• Anywhere you need a printed receipt on the spot. Phone based payment sends receipts digitally. Most customers prefer that. Some genuinely do not.
• Taking payment while your hands are full. If you are mid treatment or under a car, a fixed terminal somebody else can operate beats the phone in your back pocket.

For everyone who travels to the work, which is most mobile beauty, mobile mechanics, driving instructors, trades and home visits, the phone wins on the thing that matters, which is that it is always there.

The part nobody mentions

Taking the payment is half of it. What turns it from a convenience into a real change is the payment landing against the right job automatically, so the booking closes, the invoice marks itself paid, and the customer record shows what they spent without you typing anything.

A standalone card app takes money into a pot and leaves you to reconcile it later. That reconciliation is the job you will not do on Sunday, and it is why the takings and the diary disagree by March.

Two practical things before you switch

• Check the contactless limit for the cards your customers actually use, and know what happens on a job priced above it. Most systems fall back to the customer entering a PIN on your screen. Know which yours does before you are standing in someone's hallway.
• Test it on a real payment to yourself before a real customer. Every payment system has one step that is obvious on the second attempt and not the first.

In Youzse, in person card payments run through Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android and post straight against the booking or invoice they belong to, so the diary and the takings do not drift apart. Youzse does not sell or support separate card reader hardware, which is worth knowing if a fixed terminal is what your counter actually needs.