Time To Pet Talks Tips
Last week we wrote a blog post about all the amazing statistics we collected from 2019 called: Time To Pet—By The Numbers. These numbers came from the well over 2,000 pet sitters and dog walkers that used our software last year to grow and manage their businesses. Amongst the many incredible figures compiled from 2019 was that Time To Pet users made over $4,800,000 in tips! With that in mind, we thought it might be interesting to take another look at tip data.
In 2017, our customers prompted us to write a blog post about the volume and frequency of tips in Time To Pet. Since then, many more pet care companies have joined our platform all over the world. That means we have more tip data to share.
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To better understand this data, it's helpful to understand the different types of payments in Time To Pet. There are three main ways that payments can be processed.
- Customers can make cash or check payments on invoices, and the invoice is marked as manually paid by an admin or office manager.
- Clients can make credit card/ACH payments directly to their invoices--this can be done in the Client App as well as on the client Portal.
- Invoices can be processed directly by an Admin as long as the customer has given the admin authorization. For Admin-initiated payments, tips usually aren't included since the admin is the one processing the payment. We have excluded info on these types of payments from our data.
That leaves us with two types of payments: cash/check payments and credit card/ACH payments made by a client.
Let's compare cash/check invoices to credit card/ACH invoices between 2017 and 2019.
Cash/Check Invoices
In 2017, the average invoice paid via cash/check was $121.91. The average number of cash/check invoices that included a tip was 5.5%. The average tip percentage was 13.62%, and the average tip size was $20.67.
In 2019, the average invoice paid via cash/check was $132.86. The average number of cash/check invoices that included a tip was 5.66%. The average tip percentage was 13.37%, and the average tip size was $17.11. We've included a table showing these 2019 figures below:
Credit Card/ACH Invoices Paid Clients Through the App or Portal
In 2017, the average CC/ACH invoice size was $116.82 (slightly less than cash/check invoices). However, the average number of invoices that included a tip was 32.74% (almost 6x as much as cash/check payments). The average tip percentage was 14.31%, and the average tip size was $18.16.
In 2019, the average CC/ACH invoice size was $144.15 (more than cash/check and CC/ACH from 2017). The average number of invoices that included a tip was 42.49% (7.5x more likely than cash/check invoices). The average tip percentage was 14.01%, and the average tip size was $20.33. Here is a table for the 2019 data:
To understand this data from 2017, let's take a look at 100 average invoices paid by cash/check and 100 average invoices paid by credit card/ACH. Of the 100 invoices paid by cash/check, only 5.5 of those would receive a tip. For the 100 invoices paid by credit card/ACH, 32.74 of those would receive a tip. That leads to $113.69 in cash/check tips generated and $594.56 in credit card/ACH tips.
In 2019, for 100 average invoices, the amount in tips received for cash/check payments would be $96.89. For credit cards/ACH paid by the client, the amount would be $863.54. That's a big difference!
Wrap up
Let's break all of this data down into it's simplest form. For every $100 paid by cash/check in 2017, you could expect $0.93 in tips. For every $100 in payments made by credit card or ACH using the Client App or the Client Portal in 2017, $5.09 was left as a tip.
Here is what the same breakdown looked like for last year (2019). For a typical $100 payment, the cash payment can expect a $0.73 tip, while a credit card payment can expect a $5.99 tip.
Tips add up! They mean more revenue for your business and can be a great way to motivate staff and can help offset any credit card fees. Hopefully, you found this data as exciting as we did! If you still have questions or hesitations about accepting credit cards, take a look at this blog post on the subject.
