Gainsford Hall Workshop
How Gainsford Hall Workshop Turned “Pay It Later” Into “Pay Now” with Pay by Link
A card machine makes “pay now” easy when the customer is standing at the counter. But taking payments becomes more of a challenge when customers want to pay another way: the customer who collects their car but isn’t ready to pay on the spot, or the one who leaves promising to pay later.
For Gainsford Hall Workshop, those payments often meant waiting for a bank transfer and chasing after the work was complete. Klipboard Money Pay by Link gives their team a simpler way to make payment easier for customers and reduce the friction that delayed income.
About Gainsford Hall Workshop
Gainsford Hall Workshop is an independent garage at the heart of a close-knit rural community, offering MOTs, vehicle servicing and general repairs. The workshop runs four ramps and an MOT bay, staffed by four technicians and an apprentice, with a small two-person office handling everything from bookings to invoicing. Three quarters of its customers are known personally. That closeness is one of the workshop’s strengths. But when familiar customers are allowed to “pay later”, it can also make payment harder to collect without affecting relationships.
The “Pay it Later” Problem
Because the team knows its customers so well, “just pay it later” had become the norm for anyone not paying on the spot.
The work was done, the car was handed back, and the garage then waited on a bank transfer. Some customers paid within a day. Many didn’t. The barrier was rarely a reluctance to pay.
It was simple friction: once a customer got home, paying meant remembering the amount, finding their banking app and logging in to send a transfer, while the invoice became just more noise in their already busy day.
The garage’s accounting system would send automatic reminders, but a reminder only goes so far.
A customer would see it, resolve to deal with it, and then forget again. Repeated across a busy workshop, that pattern left the business carrying tens of thousands of pounds in unpaid invoices at the end of the month, and left the small office team spending hours on the phone and by email chasing money for work that had already been completed.
A Garage Ready to Modernise
Much of Gainsford Hall Workshop still ran on manual processes, from a paper diary for bookings to hand-keyed admin, and the business had historically been cautious about changing the way it worked.
To break that pattern, the garage brought in Kat Waterhouse, who supports Gainsford Hall Workshop across operations, admin, marketing and systems, with a clear remit: to remove the everyday friction holding the workshop back. Off-counter payments were an obvious place to start, because that was where the cash was getting stuck.
The Turning Point: Pay by Link Built into Autowork Online
The garage adopted Klipboard Money Pay by Link, built directly into Autowork Online, its garage management software.
The workflow is deliberately simple. When a job is finished and the customer isn’t there to pay, the office sends a payment link straight from Autowork Online.
The customer opens it on their phone and pays in seconds, and the payment is captured against the job without anyone having to re-key figures or chase a transfer.
This makes “pay now” possible even when the customer is no longer at the counter.
Pay by Link has reduced the need to chase for payment, and our customers really want to use it. They just press a button on their phone to pay.”
— Kat Waterhouse, Gainsford Hall Workshop.
Pay by Link: Making “Pay Now” the Easy Option
The change was straightforward, but the impact was significant. Instead of waiting for customers to remember a bank transfer after they had left the workshop, Gainsford Hall Workshop can now give them a clear and convenient way to pay as soon as the invoice is sent.
For customers, that means no searching for banking details, no logging into internet banking and no invoice left to deal with later. The payment link arrives on their phone, and paying takes just a few taps. As Kat puts it: “It’s simplified things for sure and helped people pay in a more timely manner.”
For the office team, it removes much of the manual follow-up that used to come with off-counter payments. Staff no longer have to keep checking whether a transfer has arrived, match it to the right invoice, wait for the customer to remember, or send repeated reminders.
The result is lower friction for the customer and faster payment for the workshop. Payments that once risked sitting unpaid for days or weeks are now easier to complete at the point the customer is most likely to act.
That has translated into a marked reduction in time spent chasing, and a steadier, more predictable flow of cash. Weighed against the hours the team previously lost to chasing, the return on investment for Pay by Link is clear, and the benefit will only grow as more customers move to paying by link.
The Results
- Paid in a day or two, not chased for weeks
- Less time chasing, more time for the office team
- Strong customer take-up and better customer satisfaction
- A confident first step into digital working
What’s next
For Gainsford Hall Workshop, Pay by Link has shown that small digital changes can make a meaningful difference.
Encouraged by these early results, Gainsford Hall Workshop intends to widen its use of Pay by Link as more of its customers grow comfortable paying digitally.
With payments and job management on one connected system, the garage has a simpler way to collect, and a foundation to build on as it continues to remove manual processes and modernise.
About Klipboard Money
Klipboard Money is an integrated payments solution that connects directly into Klipboard business management software. Payments are reconciled automatically into one system without manual entry. Built for distributive trades, garages and rental companies, Klipboard Money helps businesses cut down the hidden cost of payments by helping them to get paid faster, cut manual admin and protect against loss from fraud and errors.
Book a demo or find out more at https://www.klipboard.com/solutions/payment/klipboard-money
