When I was twelve years old, I told Mr Vann that my dog had been sick all over my geography homework, it was an excuse I had heard my friend Kieron successfully use a day previously. This was a bold claim, given that the family did not, and never had, owned a dog. Mr Vann knew this, because he lived four doors down and had watched my entirely petless childhood unfold over the garden fence for a decade. He gave me the look. You know the look. It is the look of a man who has heard every excuse ever invented and has decided, wearily, not to bother arguing with the latest one.
I think about that moment a lot these days, because I have spent over a decade building software for tradespeople, and in that time I have assembled a small museum of excuses that would make my twelve-year-old self blush with professional admiration.
They are not excuses for late homework. They are excuses for not paying a plumber.
We asked thousands of tradespeople, as part of the NOW Report we ran with Installer, whether a customer had ever deliberately delayed, disputed or dodged a bill. Two-thirds said yes. Then we asked for the actual excuses, and this is where it stopped being a statistic and became a comedy sketch written by someone with a grudge.
“The cat died.” That was a real one. A grown adult, presented with an invoice for work already sitting in their home keeping them warm, looked a tradesperson in the eye and said the cat had died and therefore the money could not be transferred. As though the two things were connected. As though the cat had been, in life, the household’s chief financial officer.
“Your money was in an envelope in the glove compartment of my car when it was stolen.” A wonderful image. Somewhere out there, allegedly, is a car thief who smashed a window expecting a sat-nav and found instead a plumber’s fee in cash, neatly labelled.
“I couldn’t do a bank transfer at the weekend.” This from a person holding the same smartphone on which they had booked the job, ordered a takeaway and watched four hours of television.
And my personal favourite, because it abandons the pretence entirely. “We have more money than you. See you in court.” No excuse. No dog. Just naked arithmetic and a threat.
Here is the part that is not funny. 30% of tradespeople in our research have had a customer flatly refuse to pay for completed work. Not delay. Not dispute. Refuse. Half have been ghosted the moment the job was finished, the customer vanishing like a schoolboy who owes you geography homework. This is not a run of bad luck. It is a feature of the trade, and it is costing real people real money they have already earned.
The reason it works, the reason grown adults still reach for the dead cat, is that they are betting you will not chase it. They are betting the invoice is vague, the paper trail is thin, and you are too busy and too tired to fight. Most of the time, they are right.
Which is the whole reason Powered Now exists. Not to make the excuses funnier, but to make them harder. When the quote, the job record, the signed acceptance and the invoice all sit in one place, timestamped and undeniable, “I never got an invoice” stops being an option. When the reminders send themselves, automatically and politely and relentlessly, “I forgot” stops working too. You cannot easily tell a dead-cat story to a system that has the receipts.
None of this changes the fact that some people are simply chancers. It has always been thus. But a chancer needs a gap to work in, and the gap is almost always admin. Close the gap and most of them pay up, because the dead cat only works on a tradesperson who cannot immediately prove otherwise.
Mr Vann, for the record, gave me a detention and three minus points, he also made me do the homework anyway. He understood something the trade is still learning. The excuse is never really the problem. The problem is letting the person believe, for one hopeful second, that you might actually fall for it.
The cat, I regret to inform you, is fine.
Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now. Powered Now’s mobile app aims to make it easier for plumbers, heating engineers and other trades to run their businesses. www.powerednow.com
