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How to accept a tutor payment

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The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedMay 20232 min read

Working as a tutor means dealing with multiple clients on a recurring basis, and that means a lot of individual payments to process. Fortunately, there are a number of tutoring payment options to choose from.

With the right tutor payment system in place you’ll be able to maintain cash flow, keep track of your revenue and profits and provide your clients with the flexibility they desire. In this article, we look at the various tutor payment options on offer and explain how the GoCardless payment system could do all the work of dealing with payments for you.

Invoicing

No matter what kind of payment method you opt to use, you’ll need to create invoices for your clients in order to facilitate payments. The invoice needs to include basic details such as your business name and address, a summary of the tutoring delivered (i.e. the number of hours), your hourly rate and the total owed. It should also list the payment options you accept and state how quickly you expect the invoice to be paid. The good news is that online invoicing software takes a lot of the work off your hands, automating billing for recurring payments and making it easy to track payments as they are made. Working with GoCardless means that your payment processing platform integrates seamlessly with many of the leading invoicing software apps, enabling you to offer a friction-free payment process.

Cash payments

Many tutors, particularly in the early days of their business, opt for cash payments as the default option. It’s not difficult to understand why, since a cash payment represents the tutor receiving their hourly rate immediately upon delivering the tutoring in question, but there are some problems associated. The first of these problems is that, post-pandemic particularly, many clients will be used to dealing with almost all of their payments without using cash, and may expect to do the same when it comes to making a tutor payment. The other issues with cash payments include the following:

It can be hard to track cash payments and keep accurate records of the money coming into your tutoring business.

If a client doesn’t have the cash to hand they may ask to delay payment until the next tutoring session, which will impact your cash flow.

Completing records of cash payments for the purposes of your own business planning and for things like tax accounting will end up eating into the time you could be spending building your business and delivering tutoring.

Bank transfer

Taking a tutor payment by bank transfer simplifies the process considerably. Using GoCardless you simply have to send a payment link to the client, and they click on that link to send money directly from their bank account to your bank account. The Instant Bank Pay system provided by GoCardless enables you to attach a payment link to an e-invoice, an email or even via SMS, making it easy to work in a way which appeals to your clients.

Direct debit

In many cases, your relationship as a tutor with your clients will be long term, offering a course of tutoring over a period of weeks, months or even years. For that reason, a direct debit is often the most convenient and reliable payment method to opt for. Once a client has chosen the regular payment date (i.e. the 15^th of each month) and the agreed amount of payment, the money will leave their bank account and go to yours without any further action needing to be taken.

Working with GoCardless

GoCardless represents the ideal solution for a tutor payment system thanks to the flexibility we provide. Once you partner with us you can take payments directly bank to bank as a one-off payment or on a recurring basis. All payments will be secure, tracked and recorded, making it easy to stay on top of your cash flow and revenue streams, particularly as GoCardless integrates seamlessly with other types of business and accounting software.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.