Text to pay is a payment link you send by text message. The customer taps it and pays from their own phone, usually the same day, because the bill shows up in their text messages.
Some of those texts never arrive. A phone carrier filters a payment link sent from a number nobody registered, and that message fails in silence. No bounce, no warning, nothing on your screen to say it was stopped.
If you keep sending bills that way, a $900 invoice sits unpaid for three weeks while your office calls about it twice.
By the end you will know what text to pay is and where the card number goes, then step one, the moment you send it, step two, the number you text from, step three, your link, step four, the message, and step five, who pays the card fee. It helps to know whether you handed the customer an estimate or a quote first. I am Daren Hirsch, and I built Catch CRM, which is job and customer software for trades.
Key takeaways
- A filtered payment text looks exactly like a customer who is ignoring you, so the unpaid invoice gets blamed on the customer.
- A payment link on a short web address you share with other senders gets stopped before the customer sees it.
- A payment link keeps the card number out of your business, so your yearly card paperwork stays on the shortest form the card brands publish.
- Passing the card fee to the customer is a surcharge. Visa allows it on credit cards only, never above 3%, and not at all in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts or Oklahoma.
How text to pay works, and where the card number goes
Text to pay moves in five steps. The message is an ordinary SMS, which is the plain text that arrives in the phone's own messaging app. Four of those steps happen on the customer's phone without you.
Call it a text invoice, a pay by text message or an SMS payment. The customer sees a line of text and a link.
Short answer: you text the customer a link, they tap it, they pay on your processor's secure page, and the card number never reaches you.
- You send the amount and the link from your business number, the moment the work is finished.
- The customer taps the link, which opens a payment page your processor runs.
- They pay with a card, Apple Pay or Google Pay, and both of you get a receipt.
How I know: the card industry's own rulebook is built around that split, and its shortest form says so on the page linked below.
Your own part of this is thinner than it looks. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS, is the card brands' security rulebook. Every business that takes a card tells its bank once a year which set of those rules it followed, on a form called SAQ A.
The eligibility rules for SAQ A are strict about three things. You may take payments only when the card is not in front of you. All card handling sits with a provider who follows the rules. And your own business "does not electronically store, process, or transmit any account data", which means the card number and the details beside it.
If you read a card number out over the phone instead, you give that up. The number is now in your call notes, and your own systems are covered by the rules rather than exempt from them. The two ways of taking a card lead to two different piles of paperwork.
Now you know where the card number goes. A payment link is also not the same as a charge on a phone bill. Carrier billing puts the amount on the customer's wireless statement, and text to pay never touches that.
Step one: pick the moment you send it
Four moments come up on real jobs, and each one is a different message. A deposit invoice goes out when the job is booked. The balance goes out while your tech is still in the driveway. An evening batch covers the jobs that ran long, and a payment reminder text goes out 3 days later to whoever has not paid.
The driveway one is worth protecting. A customer looking at finished work pays a bill they can see the reason for. The same invoice at 8pm is one notification among forty.
The part that surprises people is whose job this is. Jobs that get paid late are rarely the ones with a difficult customer. They are the ones where nobody decided who sends the text invoice.
Step two: register the number you text from
Business texting runs in a registered lane, and most trades skip this step. A text from a business to a customer is application-to-person traffic, or A2P. On an ordinary ten-digit phone number, the carriers call that 10DLC. Whoever provides your texting registers your brand and your campaign with The Campaign Registry.
Unregistered traffic gets slowed down or dropped. Registration also sets how many messages a minute you may send, and that limit breaks an evening batch. The fees, the forms and the trap that catches sole proprietors are in our guide to 10DLC registration.
Two notes on the number itself. Text from the business line the customer already has, because a payment link from a strange mobile number reads as a scam. Ask your provider whether that line is text-enabled, since a landline does not carry SMS until somebody turns it on.
A registered number is only half of it, because the carriers read the link too.
Step three: get your link off a public shortener
A free public shortener is one web address shared by millions of senders. So a scammer using bit.ly today poisons every bit.ly link behind them. A carrier spends less by shutting out the whole domain than by judging each message.
The industry guidance says this plainly. CTIA is the trade group for the wireless companies. Its messaging guidelines, last published in May 2023, say that senders "should use a shortener with a web address ... dedicated to the exclusive use of the Message Sender."
The same page asks for one more thing people miss. Your link, and the page it opens, should "unambiguously identify the website owner" and carry contact details, including a mailing address. So your name and address on that page keep the message deliverable.
Ask your payment provider one question: is the short web address in my payment link used by anybody else? A yes is the whole problem, and your provider has to fix it rather than you. Some sell this as a separate text to pay app, and a standalone text to pay service leaves your office working in two places.
The next question is the message itself.
Step four: write the message the way a customer reads it
A customer decides whether to tap in about two seconds. Here is the order that gets tapped: your business name, the amount, the job, the link. Lead with the name, because they did not save your number.
Hartley Plumbing: your invoice for today's water heater install is $1,240, and you can pay it here: pay.hartleyplumbing.com/4821 (reply STOP to opt out).
Three habits are worth copying from that line. The amount comes before the link, so nobody taps to find out what they owe. The job is named in the customer's own words, not by an invoice number they have never seen. STOP is the word the carriers expect for an opt-out, and the line telling the customer to use it has to be there.
Step five: decide who pays the card fee
A surcharge is the extra amount you add for paying by card. Your cost of acceptance means the amount your processor charges you to take that card. Visa's surcharging requirements set four limits at once.
Credit cards only, to start with. A debit or prepaid card can never carry the fee, even though it arrives through the same link. The amount may not be more than your cost of acceptance, and 3% is the ceiling when that cost runs higher. Tell your acquirer, the bank that processes your card payments, 30 days before the first one.
The fee has to be itemized on the receipt. Visa's rulebook sets those limits, but it does not tell you whether your own state allows a surcharge at all.
Your state can take the choice away. Visa lists Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Oklahoma as states that prohibit or limit it. Connecticut's statute is only one line: "No person may impose a surcharge on any transaction." If you guess wrong there, a $6,000 job turns into a complaint about the $180 you added.
What text to pay will not fix
A faster bill does not make a customer solvent. If you wait for the link to do that work, a $4,000 balance stays a $4,000 balance. Someone avoiding that bill avoids a link as fast as an envelope. Our past due invoice letter covers the wording and the state deadline behind it.
Three other things stay where they were. The link does not create permission to text a customer who never gave you a number. It does not rescue a bill the customer cannot follow. And the lien deadline starts from your last day on site, not the day you asked to be paid.
What you get when the invoice goes out from the job
We built Catch CRM for home service and trade businesses across the United States, around the money side of a job. Here is what that looks like on one of our customers' jobs, in the order we set it up.
Your tech builds the invoice from your own saved prices while the work is in front of them. The customer gets it as a text with a payment link on your own short web address, the dedicated one the CTIA rule asks for. SMS invoicing and the follow-up run from one job record, so the reminder goes out 3 days later.
When the money arrives, the job is marked paid without anybody typing it in twice. Every call, text and payment on that job sits in one place, which is where you look eight months later when a customer asks what they paid for.
FAQ
Can I send a payment link from my own cell phone?
You can send one from it, and that is the main reason these texts get ignored. A personal mobile number has no registered brand behind it, so the carrier has nothing to check it against.
What do I do when the customer says the text never arrived?
Check whether your other texts to that number went through before you blame the phone. One undelivered message usually means that handset. A pattern across several customers points at your registration or your link domain.
Can I offer a discount for paying cash instead?
Yes, and that is the route open to you in a state that bans surcharges. The same Connecticut statute says nothing prohibits a seller from offering a discount to induce a buyer to pay by cash, debit card or check. The law cares about the label, not the arithmetic.
Getting paid before the truck leaves the driveway
Estimates, invoices and the payment links that go with them live beside your jobs in Catch CRM. A finished job can be billed and paid before your tech is back on the road. If your invoices go out in the evening and get paid three weeks later, book a demo, which is a short call where we set this up against your own job list. We can do the same for the estimates and invoices you still build by hand.
This is general information, not legal advice. Consult an attorney about your situation.