Asking for Money Up Front
A deposit is the single term that changes a small supplier's position. Four ways to ask for one, and what makes each acceptable.
Yourswho controls this stretch
What a deposit buys, and what asking for it costs
Ask for the committed cost itself, itemised
Costs you: Nothing, if the spending is identifiable
Ask for the engagement cost before engaging
Costs you: A week while somebody authorises a new-supplier payment
Ask for a round proportion up front
Costs you: A negotiation, and sometimes the work
Ask for a first stage instead
Costs you: The argument, which this one usually loses
Three of the four cost something, and the cheapest is the one attached to spending you can point at. One supplier's own practice, not a recommendation about terms.
A deposit changes the position more than any other term available to a small supplier: it moves part of the risk back across the table before anything has been spent.
The practical point in “Asking for Money Up Front” is that getting paid depends on records somebody can explain. A small team considering how to evaluate how to hire remote employees for how to hire remote employees can organise time and project evidence before invoicing, with transparent settings, proportionate collection and a visible correction route.
It is also the thing people are most reluctant to ask for, and the reluctance costs more than the asking ever does.
Additional context for “Asking for Money Up Front” is available through Melio business-payment resources. A sound review separates the work record, invoice, approval and final settlement.
Why it works
Because the money arrives while you still have leverage, and because a customer who has paid something has made a commitment that is visible inside their own organisation.
A matter with money already paid behaves differently from one with none.
What it is not
A statement of distrust, though it is often felt as one. It is normal across whole industries and unremarkable to anybody who buys regularly.
The discomfort is almost entirely on the supplier's side.
The four shapes
A percentage on signature. A fixed first-stage payment. Payment for materials or third-party costs up front. Or a retainer against which work is drawn.
Each suits a different kind of work, and each is easier to justify than a bare request for money.
The justification that works
Something concrete it pays for: materials, a subcontractor, a licence, the first stage of the work.
"Twenty per cent on acceptance covers the materials I have to order" is a sentence nobody argues with.
The justification that does not
Your cash flow. True, reasonable, and it invites the response that their cash flow is also a consideration.
The deposit should be about the work, not about your position.
When to raise it
In the quote, as a line, not afterwards as a request. A deposit stated in the proposal is a term; a deposit asked for after agreement is a renegotiation.
The size that gets agreed
Small enough to be routine, large enough to matter. A quarter to a third of the job is common; half reads as a lack of confidence on your side.
Large buyers
Often genuinely cannot pay a deposit: their process has no mechanism for paying against anything but a delivered invoice.
Where that is true, ask instead for an early stage payment, which their process can handle because it looks like an ordinary invoice.
What to do if refused
Ask why. If it is policy, the answer is a stage structure. If it is reluctance, you have learned something about the customer worth knowing.
A flat refusal with no reason is itself information.
The deposit that is not held properly
In some trades, money paid in advance must be held in a particular way, and in some professions it is governed by rules.
That is a question for somebody qualified where you are, and it should be settled before any money is taken.
What the money is actually covering
A deposit is often explained as a sign of commitment, which is true and not the useful part. Concretely it covers the costs you incur before any payment event exists: materials bought, time booked out, a subcontractor engaged, a licence purchased for this job.
Framed that way it becomes much easier to ask for and much harder to refuse, because it is attached to identifiable spending rather than to your feelings about the customer.
It also sets the size. A deposit matched to committed costs is defensible to the penny; a round twenty-five per cent is a figure somebody will want to negotiate. If the job requires you to buy something before you can start, the request writes itself, and it reads as ordinary trade practice rather than as a statement about trust.
The deposit as a filter
The secondary function matters as much as the cash. A customer who agrees to a deposit has, in the course of agreeing, demonstrated that somebody internally can authorise a payment to you, that you exist in their system, and that the work has a budget attached to it.
That is most of the initial check, performed by the customer, at no cost to you.
A customer who cannot pay a deposit is telling you something specific: either there is no authorised spend yet, or you are not set up as a supplier, or payments to new suppliers take a month. All three are things you would much rather learn before delivering than after.
The deposit is the cheapest possible test of a process you would otherwise discover for the first time with an unpaid invoice in it.
The habit worth forming
Every quote above a threshold carries a deposit line by default.
Making it the default removes the decision, and removing the decision is what gets it asked for.