If you're collecting payments outside of ServiceTitan, you're making life harder than it needs to be. Techs keying in cards, an office team reconciling deposits by hand, and merchant fees quietly eating your margin every month. Most of this is fixable. Here's how I'd set up payments in ServiceTitan so the money comes in faster and your books stay clean.
Just use ServiceTitan Payments
I'll say this plainly. Use ServiceTitan Payments. That's ServiceTitan's built-in merchant services, and your life is going to be so much easier with it than without it.
Run payments through an outside processor and you lose a ton of functionality. Card payments don't auto-reconcile with your bank deposits the way they do with ServiceTitan Payments. You can't scan in checks the same way. Membership billing, refunds, and deposits all get messy. You end up paying people to do manual work that didn't need to happen, and every step is a chance for human error. What's the cost of messed-up books? Not worth it.
The objection I hear is always the rate. Somebody's got a processor offering 2.5% instead of whatever ServiceTitan quotes. First, don't be afraid to negotiate your rate, especially if you're pushing a lot of volume. You probably won't get the lowest rate on the market, but it's worth asking. Second, the customer pays the transaction fee anyway. It should be built into your pricing, and I'll show you how in a minute. Full disclosure, I work at ServiceTitan and hold stock options, but this course isn't a ServiceTitan product. You're paying me directly, so I'm only on your side here.
Use a card reader, every time
This one's quick but it matters. Whenever your tech takes a credit card in the field, they should be using a card reader. Don't let them just key in the card number.
Here's why. When you key in a card instead of reading it, you pay what's called a card-not-present fee. This isn't a ServiceTitan thing, it's how merchant services work everywhere. Keying in the number tells the card network the card might not be there, so they assume more risk for fraud and chargebacks and charge more to cover it. That charge lands on you. A 3% fee can become 3.5%. And here's the part people miss. When your tech uses the phone camera to scan the card and it auto-fills the number, that still counts as keying it in. To get the lower rate you have to use the chip, the mag swipe, or tap to pay.
This used to be a pain because you had to hand techs a separate Bluetooth reader, keep it charged, and trust them to actually use it. But ServiceTitan Payments is moving to a newer backend that lets phones with NFC use tap to pay directly, no extra device. It works with any card that has tap to pay, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay. If that's available to you, get on it. One note, checks are different. Scanning a check with the camera doesn't cost you an extra fee. The card-not-present thing only applies to cards.
Text invoices and payment links to your customers
People pay faster when paying is easy. ServiceTitan lets you send invoices and payment links by text, and you control all of it under the invoicing and online payments settings. Here are the ones worth knowing.
Enable credit card payments is the obvious one. There's also pay by bank, a modernized ACH transfer where the customer connects their bank through Plaid and sends money straight to you. Pay by bank requires the newer version of ServiceTitan Payments where Adyen is the partner, so it won't show up for everyone yet. To text payment links, flip on the switch for sending SMS payment links from the office, and there's a separate setting for the mobile app. On mobile your tech gets the option under the actions dropdown, the same place they'd email an invoice. The link is the same one you'd email, and it ties into the customer portal, so the customer taps in, sees their invoice, and pays. You're texting them the invoice and the pay button in one shot.
One setting worth pointing out is the checkbox to default "save this payment method" on mobile transactions. If you sell ongoing memberships that auto-bill, you need a card on file, so defaulting that on means your techs don't have to remember it. Just know that saving a card means you're legally required to tell the customer, and ServiceTitan pops up a reminder. To send a link from the office, open an invoice and look for the text bubble next to the envelope icon. Pick a number on file or type one in, hit send, done.
Cover your merchant fees the right way
Credit card fees are a cost of doing business. You've got to cover them somehow or your business stops being a business. The question is how.
Why a credit card surcharge is the wrong move
The first thing most people reach for is a flat card fee. It's simple, but it's the wrong call. Charging a card fee is illegal in a lot of states, and even where it's legal it's probably against your merchant services terms of service. On top of that, it makes people mad. Nobody wants to pay a fee. On a high-ticket HVAC install almost nobody pays cash anyway, it's card or check, and plenty of younger homeowners have never written a check in their life. So they'll pay your fee, but they'll be annoyed. Bad customer experience over a few bucks.
The math for baking it into your prices
The right move is to raise your prices enough to cover the fees so the cost is invisible. "Just raise your prices" is the advice you always hear, but nobody tells you by how much. Here's the formula. Your average processing fee times the percentage of payments you take by card.
For the average processing fee, pull your statement from your payment portal. On ServiceTitan Payments the older portal is Translink. At the bottom of the report you'll see discounts and fees. Despite the name, the discount is also a fee, so add them together. Divide that by your deposit total, which is what you collected from cards that period. In my example that's 0.0314, a 3.14% average fee. For the card percentage, run the All Payments report in ServiceTitan for the same month. Clear any filter on the credit remaining column first, note your total payments, then filter the payment method column to credit card only. In my case it was 204 card payments out of 271 total, about 75%.
Run the formula. 3.14% times 0.75 is about 2.4%. So I'd raise prices across the board 2.4% to cover my card fees. Notice that's less than the 3.14% I pay on a card transaction, and that's on purpose. The card customer still nets me a little less than cash would, but the check and cash folks now pay 2.4% more too, which makes up the difference. One tip, don't run this for a single month. Blend it over a full year, especially if you're seasonal like HVAC.
How to apply it in ServiceTitan
The cleanest way is dynamic pricing. Go to Pricebook, open Pricing Builder, click into the dynamic pricing tab, edit your service rule, and add a surcharge. Choose percent and put in your number, 2.4% in my case. Set it once and prices update automatically as your costs change. If you're not using dynamic pricing, and I think that's a mistake, you can do it manually in the main pricebook. Flip to edit mode, check the master box to select everything, click into the static price column, choose increase by percentage, enter 2.4%, and apply. Either way the customer never sees a fee. The price they see is just the price.
Collect deposits without wrecking your books
If you take money up front for work you haven't done yet, turn on the deposit workflow. It's the built-in way to handle deposits, and there's no reason to skip it. You can technically collect deposits without it, but it's a manual process with no guardrails, so it's easy to mess up. It used to only work with QuickBooks Desktop, but once the journal entry integration added the applied payments transaction type, it started working with QuickBooks Online too.
The setting lives under invoicing and payment collections. Toggle it on, then pick your GL account. You want a dedicated customer deposits account, and it has to be a liability account. That's the important part. When you collect a deposit for work you haven't done, that money isn't revenue yet. You're still on the hook to do the work, so it's a liability.
Here's what happens behind the scenes. You collect money as a credit, not tied to any invoice, and it sits in undeposited funds. When the deposit exports, it moves into your liability account where it belongs. Later, when you apply it to the real invoice, it moves into AR and gets recognized as revenue. One thing that trips people up. Once the workflow is on, every payment passes through that liability account, deposit or not. Unapplied payments get held there, applied ones pass straight through to AR. That's how ServiceTitan keeps you from ending up with negative AR when you collect before the work is done.
In the field, you collect the deposit on top of a sold estimate, not an invoice. Sell the estimate, mark that the work will be done later, and a Pay Deposit button shows up. Take a partial amount to lock in their spot, then email them the estimate. That emailed estimate is their receipt and shows the deposit and remaining balance. Train your techs to mention that, because people get uneasy handing over $500 with no proof of it. You can do the same from the office through the collect and apply payment screen.
My real advice is to turn on auto apply rules in the same settings so the credit lands on the right invoice automatically. This only works with the book-job-through-sold-estimate workflow, which is how you should book these jobs anyway. Convert the estimate into the job and ServiceTitan rolls the deposit over. Now when your installers go out, the remaining balance is already correct, and you skip the confused phone call where a customer gets asked to overpay.
Wrapping up
None of this is a huge project on its own. Run payments through ServiceTitan Payments, use a card reader, text your invoices, bake your fees into pricing, and turn on the deposit workflow. Do those five things and you'll get more cash in the door with a lot less manual cleanup.
If this was useful, the guide goes much deeper. It's searchable video lessons covering payments, deposits, pricebook, memberships, and every other part of ServiceTitan, built for every role on your team. You can check it out here: https://www.bluecollarnerd.com/#pricing.