Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

Accept 3% Credit Card Fees!

21 Jan 2026 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:54

Mike Andes (speaker) argues small businesses should accept credit-card payments (paying ~3% processing) instead of using high-interest bridge loans or lines of credit (often 15–40%), because cards provide immediate cash and reduce cash-flow crunches. He recommends requiring a card on file for every accepted estimate (enforced via a Homeworks workflow setting), and cites Homeworks-specific features: 1% ACH capped at $5, card-expiration email notifications, and alerts to the merchant when cards expire. Tone: instructional, operational.

Questions this video answers

Mike Andes

About 3% (speaker: 'I will not pay 3%' referenced as processing fee)

1% ACH fee, capped at $5

Require a card on file for every accepted estimate (enforceable via a Homeworks settings button)

Lines of credit, bridge loans, QuickBooks/Stripe loans with interest rates the speaker estimates at roughly 15–40%

Chapters

This boggles my mind because when I said collect card information, somebody like, there's no way I'm paying 3%. When you look at loans and debt that so many people will use when they're cash constrained, many times a line of credit or some sort of bridge loan, working capital loan from your bank is going to be well over 20% depending on the interest rates that you're currently in the environment. If you're using like a stripe loan or a QuickBooks loan, it could be well over 30 or 40%. Let's just use 20% like a credit card. 25% is probably what a credit card is right now. Here's the thing. It's amazing to me that someone was I will not pay 3% in credit card processing fees. But yeah, I'm going to go get a line of credit and pay the bank 25% or 20% or 15% on a loan to bridge my cash flow. Why not just accept credit cards and pay 3% to get the money tomorrow in your bank account? Because that's why you have the cash flow crunch. You're not requiring credit cards on file. Every single customer that ever accept an estimate for me must have a car on file. And, and I did it by clicking a button inside of homework settings to where they can't accept the estimate without that happening. So I pay 3% for credit cards. I don't pay 3% on $100,000 of $3,000. Great. Inside of Homeworks we charge 1% for ACH and it's capped at 5 bucks. There's no one else in the market that will cap it at five bucks. Now you're pay five dollars. Get the, get your payment right away. So if you're paying somewhere between 1 and 3% for processing with ACH or credit cards or whatever, why are we crying over that when we're. At the same time you're using your credit card and at the same time you're using a bridge loan. At the same time using a credit card processing loan, at the same time using a line of credit that is charging 15, 20%. It's crazy and it's all because we have bad cash flow. Fix the problem. Here's the solution. Except credit cards, every single car, every single estimate gets accepted, has like you push one button homeworks and that will never be a problem again. What if it expires? Great. As soon as it expires, it sends them an email and sends me a notification and immediately I'm going to be letting them know in seven days that overdue invoice is getting more fees.