Understanding How Pinch Works Best - Industry by Industry

As a Pinch merchants you most likely have the same goal as everyone else. That is, getting cash flow certainty. Whether it's by making it easier for your customers to pay, or getting your customers to pay automatically, the goal is to collect more payments with less chasing.

The way that Pinch can help a business achieve this is with auto-debit. The most common form of auto-debit that we enable, are pre-approvals. These are digital agreements between a merchant and a paying customer, which allows the merchant to automatically deduct money from the customer whenever the merchant raises an invoice. Pre-approvals are used to collect more than half of the payments we collect for our 1000+ merchants and are used across every industry we service.

Speaking of industries we service, just by looking back at our most recent 100 merchant signups you'll find businesses from more than 20 different sectors. It's safe to say we're not a niche provider!

Below is a breakdown of some of the business types found in our last 100 merchant sign-ups and the specific features that are frequently utilised by them. Finding the one most like you is a great place to start when it comes to configuring Pinch.

Home service providers - home cleaners, gardeners and pool maintenance companies:

Our home services merchants love the standard pre-approvals feature because it works great for both parties. Merchants get paid on time and the home owners don't have to think about anything at all. Because neither party really needs to communicate with each other all that much it makes both parties lives easier.

Some of our pool maintenance merchants find a great use for pre-approvals as they allows them to do variable recurring payments. These are ongoing payments that change in value each time, such as pool chemicals costs. This is not something most other auto-debit products are capable of, with most only supporting recurring payments of the same amount.

This is also a great feature for cleaners, lawnmowing companies and basically any company that have variable recurring payments. Find out how to set up pre-approvals here.

Business advisories, accountants and bookkeepers:

Like most of our merchants financial advisors are heavy pre-approvals users for the same reasons as above. Occasionally they will have retainer based service models too. so our subscriptions feature is often used to offer different levels of service and prevent the need for raising invoices at all. How to set up a subscription.

Allied healthcare and community wellness professionals including in home aged care providers, meals on wheels services, speech pathologists, physiotherapists, specialists and more:

Pre-approvals and subscriptions are both often used in the health industry. Subscriptions are particularly useful for any healthcare provider who does a program of sessions where the cost per session doesn't change.

It's the administrative power of Pinch that many of these companies start to really appreciate. We find they often use Pinch to collect payments and set up pre-approvals on behalf of their customers, either in store or over the phone. This makes a lot of sense as asking in person before or after a session is usually the easiest way to get them over the line or get your invoice paid. Here's how to use Pinch to collect payments and set up pre-approvals as an admin user.

Professional services such as offshoring agencies, recruiters, architects, printing companies, IT companies, marketing agencies and software development firms:

Quite similar to accountancies, these companies often use pre-approvals for collecting variable recurring payments such as web design agencies collecting hosting and maintenance payments. They also often have retainer solutions in place so the subscriptions feature is quite handy, especially if the amounts stay the same ongoing.

Tech companies, marketplace websites and software as a service companies:

We have many tech companies who use Pinch's payment technology inside their own apps, and even more that simply bill through Pinch outside their software. The Payment Plans and Subscriptions features really shine for merchants like this.

School tutors and music teachers:

These companies are very similar to home services companies in terms of their use. The biggest challenge is that their invoices are usually bigger than a law mow, so it can be tougher to persuade customers to use pre-approvals. Merchants like these really need to check out this article.

Wholesalers across a range of industries including pharmaceuticals, food and beverage and fashion:

Wholesalers get a lot of value out of Pinch which is why we have an integration with DEAR Inventory. When Pinch is correctly integrated with DEAR and Xero, you can automate collecting payments from purchase orders with no manual intervention. Raise a support ticket if you want to ask us to integrate with a different inventory management system.

Real estate agencies:

Pinch works great for collecting on marketing costs during the sales process, and is a good solution for collecting rental payments too, especially now that we can switch on a feature to allow you to download an ABA File. This way you can send payments to multiple different accounts even if you're using a single accounting file. Read about how it works.

Tradies such as electricians and builders:

Pinch is not only good for collecting on routine work, but project work too. You can set up variable payment plans with fixed amounts over any number of payments you like. Which means you can set up a plan with a different down payment number to the rest of the series. Want to take 50% up front then two 25% payments? You can!

Tradies of this type also get benefit regularly from allowing customers to pay off overdue existing invoices in smaller chunks to help them clear off bad debt.

Sporting clubs, community organisations and churches:

Automating the collection of subscription fees is very easy within Pinch, either with the pre-approvals feature or the payment plans and subscriptions. We have dozens of sports clubs, business clubs, churches and even a rideshare club using Pinch!

The challenges in each of these sectors are different, however everyone is tied together by a similar goal which is to achieve more cash flow certainty by reducing the amount of people you let pay you based on trust.

Pinch is designed to do this in a range of ways but not all Pinch features apply to each industry as you can see above. To help you understand how to apply Pinch best in each industry, we've broken it down into your payer types because at the end of the day, it comes down to what type of payer you're dealing with, to determine the path of least resistance in getting them to adopt Pinch and importantly, to let you automatically debit them.

Click here if you'd like to understand how Pinch works Best for Payers.

Updated 2025