Custom orders with a lead time: taking money before the work starts
On a made-to-order job the customer pays weeks before anything exists. Here is how to split that money so neither end of the job is awkward.
A made-to-order job is paid for before it exists
You quote a kitchen, a set of gates, a dress, a signage package for a shopfront. The customer says yes. Then, from where they are standing, nothing happens for eight or twelve or twenty weeks. From where you are standing a great deal happens immediately: sheet goods get ordered to a size that fits only this job, a powder coater gets booked, a week of bench time in a month you were holding open stops being available to anyone else. Two commitments are made on the day they say yes, and they are not the same size. Yours is immediate and in money; theirs is a signature and a date in their diary. Almost every awkward conversation about paying up front comes from that gap, and it does not get less awkward by being left until later.
Name what the money up front is for
A customer who hears a percentage hears an opinion. A customer who hears what the amount buys hears a reason. On most made-to-order work the price splits into four parts, and only one of them can reasonably wait until the end:
Materials and bought-in components that are cut, ordered or made to this job's dimensions and are worth very little to the next customer.
The slot. A workshop week given to this job is a week refused to someone else, and it cannot be sold again afterwards.
Work already done before any material was touched: the site measure, the drawings, the templates, the revisions to the drawings.
Labour still to come, which is the part the customer has not yet received and the part they are entitled to pay for as it happens.
Being able to say those four things out loud is the difference between asking for half up front because that is what you always ask for, and asking for an amount a customer agrees to without feeling tested. It also tells you honestly whether your usual split is too generous to yourself or not generous enough.
Where half now, half on delivery stops working
Fifty-fifty is the trade standard and it is fine on a short job for a modest sum. On a long, expensive one both halves land badly. The first is a large single number on the same day as a large decision, which is the moment a customer is least willing to move money around. People who genuinely want the thing still hesitate at the size of the first transfer rather than the size of the total.
The second half is worse, because it arrives in the delivery week. That is the week the vehicle is booked, the fitters are scheduled and your own suppliers want paying. It is also the week a customer first sees the finished item, so any snag, real or imagined, becomes a reason to hold the entire remaining balance while it is discussed. You find out about a payment problem on the morning you wanted to load, which is the latest possible moment for it to be useful to you.
Shape the schedule like the build
The lead time is the opportunity. The dates in a made-to-order job are known the day it is confirmed: materials ordered, carcass or body built, finishing, delivery. A schedule that follows those stages is easy to explain and easy to defend, because each payment sits next to something that has actually happened. Three or four dated amounts across a twelve-week build ask less of the customer at any one moment than two halves, and they give you money arriving at roughly the rate you are spending it.
With SPLTR you set those dates and amounts once, and the customer's own card is charged on them by your own Stripe account. Nobody advances anyone money, and nothing about the arrangement is a debt: it is the same price, agreed once, collected on a calendar instead of in a chase. If a card fails it is retried and the customer is emailed automatically, so a card reissued halfway through a long build turns into an email in week five rather than a problem in the delivery week.
Two details are worth getting right. Put the last payment before the item leaves you, not on the day it arrives, so the schedule finishes while the job is still in your building. And if you hold back a small amount against snags, make it an explicit line with its own date rather than an open question the customer settles whenever they are satisfied, because an open question at the end of a long job is the one that goes unanswered for a month.