Collecting a deposit in Canada: what it actually costs

The real decision isn't the website

You don't need a website to take a deposit online. If you've switched the deposit option on for a quote, the payment step is already built into it: the customer opens the quote on their phone, taps to approve, and card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and bank transfer are sitting right there to pick from. There's no separate link to generate and paste into a text or a follow-up email. No storefront, no domain, no checkout page you'd need to design. The part that actually deserves your mental bandwidth isn't the delivery mechanism, it's which payment method you're steering the customer toward. On a $2,000 deposit, the difference between a card and a bank transfer is about fifty dollars, and the difference between a proper record and an e-Transfer you have to go hunting for in your banking app is an hour a month you never get back.

How the deposit gets set on the quote

Before any of this, the deposit itself is configured on the quote you send, not tacked on after the fact. You choose a percentage or a fixed dollar amount, and accepting the deposit becomes part of the customer approving the quote in the first place. Your deposit policy is also a company-level setting, so once you've decided your standard, whether that's 50% up front or a flat $200, it applies the same way across every quote you send instead of you deciding fresh each time. One thing worth flagging before the tax section further down: the deposit itself isn't taxed at the point you set it on the quote. Tax gets calculated and applied later, when you invoice.

Because the deposit lives on the quote, it goes out the same way the quote did: by email, tied to that specific customer, with the payment options built into approving it rather than sent as a separate link afterward. That's a different mechanism from Checkouts, the separate feature you'd reach for to build a link-based sales page for a bundle or a general sale that isn't attached to one quote or one customer. If what you're doing is collecting a deposit against a specific job you already quoted, the payment step is already on the quote itself.

What each option actually costs on a $2,000 deposit

Here's the comparison most articles won't give you, because most articles aren't written by someone who has to publish their own processing rates. These are Chronly's rates as of August 2026, on a $2,000 deposit:

• Interac e-Transfer — free on some business accounts, a dollar or two per transfer on others depending on the bank. What you give up: manual matching, no automatic record, and transfer limits set by the customer's bank, not by you.

• Card / Apple Pay / Google Pay, Free plan (2.9% + $0.30) — $58.30. Nothing given up, but it's the priciest option.

• Card / Apple Pay / Google Pay, Seller or Pro (2.79% + $0.15) — $55.95. Requires a paid plan.

• Bank transfer, Free plan (1%, $1 minimum) — $20.00. The $5 cap only kicks in on Seller and Pro.

• Bank transfer, Seller or Pro (1%, $1 minimum, $5 cap) — $5.00. Requires a paid plan.

That $5 line is the one worth staring at. The cap means a $2,000 bank transfer and a $20,000 bank transfer both cost you $5. Seller runs $9.99 a month (15% off if you pay annually), so one mid-sized deposit collected by bank transfer instead of card more than covers the subscription for the month.

There's also a $0.40 fee per payout batch, not per transaction. Payouts run daily right now whenever there are funds sitting in your account, so a busy week costs a few dollars in batching, not a few dollars per job. Funds usually land in your bank one to three business days after a payment.

So why not just use e-Transfer for everything?

Plenty of trades do, and for a $300 deposit on a small repair, it's hard to argue with free. The problem shows up at volume and at size.

Limits are the first issue, and they're set by the sender's bank, not by you. They vary a lot between institutions. A customer trying to send a $5,000 deposit might discover partway through that their daily limit only lets them send half of it today, which turns into three transfers over two days and a text thread you have to reconcile by hand.

There's also no record attached to anything. The money shows up with a memo line that says whatever the customer felt like typing. Six months later, working out whether a particular deposit ever got applied to an invoice means cross-referencing bank statements against a text thread. And nobody sends an e-Transfer a polite reminder, so if the customer forgets, that follow-up is on you.

To e-Transfer's credit, it's effectively final. A customer can't reverse one the way they can dispute a card charge. If you're taking a large deposit from someone you've never worked with before, that finality is worth something, and it's a fair reason to choose it even at the cost of the manual work.

Here's the simple rule: let the method follow the amount. Small deposits, whatever's easiest. Anything over roughly $500, where that $5 bank transfer cap starts to matter, or anything you want tied to a customer record and an invoice, run it through the quote instead of an e-Transfer.

The workflow, start to finish

The sequence that works, assuming you quoted the job by phone or text:

1. Build the quote, and switch the deposit option on if the job needs one. Percentage or fixed amount, your call. Even a short quote sets out the scope the deposit relates to, which matters if the customer later argues about what they paid for. Sending quotes and invoices doesn't cost anything on any plan; you're only charged when a customer actually pays online.

2. Send the quote. That's the whole delivery step. There's no separate payment link to generate and send after the fact.

3. The customer approves on their phone. If the deposit option is on, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay and bank transfer are presented right there as part of approving it, and they pick one and pay on the spot. If you didn't set a deposit, converting the approved quote into an invoice takes one click, and the invoice carries the same payment options.

4. Wait for confirmation before you buy anything. This is the step people skip. On Pro, a job record holds the quote, the invoice, the schedule and the full activity history in one place, so "has the deposit landed" is a glance rather than a bank login. On Seller and Pro you can also fire a webhook to whatever you use for scheduling or ordering. On the Free plan you'll see the payment against the customer record.

5. Then order materials and block the date.

If chasing is a recurring problem, automatic payment reminders are on every plan including Free, which is the one piece of this that e-Transfer structurally cannot do.

How much should the deposit be?

There's no legal standard rate in Canada, and anyone quoting you one is quoting a custom, not a rule. The useful way to think about it is coverage rather than percentage: the deposit should at minimum cover the materials you have to buy before you can invoice for anything. For a lot of trades that lands somewhere between 25% and 50% of the job. For custom or made-to-order work where the materials are worthless to anyone else, closer to full materials cost plus a slice of labour is defensible.

What genuinely constrains you is provincial consumer protection law. Several provinces, Ontario and British Columbia among them, give consumers a cancellation right of roughly ten days on contracts signed away from your place of business, which for most trades means the customer's kitchen table. The customer can cancel in that window and get their money back. Two practical consequences: put the agreement in writing and give the customer a copy, and don't spend a large deposit on non-returnable materials on day one of a direct agreement. Rules differ by province and by contract type, so it's worth twenty minutes checking your own province's requirements rather than assuming Ontario's rules apply in Alberta.

The GST/HST bit almost nobody gets right

A deposit is not automatically taxable when you receive it. Under the Excise Tax Act, an amount taken as a deposit generally isn't treated as consideration for a supply until you apply it against the purchase price of the work. In practice that means the GST/HST point usually arrives when you invoice and apply the deposit, not on the day the money hits your account, which can push the tax into a different reporting period than the cash.

The exception people trip on: if the customer walks and you keep the deposit, a forfeited deposit on a taxable supply is generally deemed to include GST/HST, so you remit tax on money you kept for a job you never did. That surprises people.

Chronly tracks and reports what you collect and hands clean records to your accounting software. It doesn't file anything and it isn't a substitute for an accountant, so treat the above as the reason to ask yours a specific question rather than as the answer.

Before you can take cards at all

Card and bank payments run through Finix, our payments processor. Finix reviews and approves merchant accounts, and that decision and its timing sit with them, not with us, so we're not going to give you a number of days. The practical advice is to start that process before you need it. Set up the account in a quiet week, not on the afternoon a customer says yes to a $12,000 job and you'd like the deposit today. Card and bank details are tokenized the moment they're entered, so raw card and account numbers never sit in Chronly.

Meanwhile, nothing stops you sending quotes and invoices while that's in progress, and nothing stops you taking an e-Transfer in the interim.

A reasonable default

If you want one rule to follow: turn the deposit option on for every job that needs one, and let card and bank transfer both sit there as options without steering the customer toward either. Most will pick a card because it's two taps, and you'll pay for the convenience. Some will pick bank transfer, and on Seller or Pro that's capped at $5 no matter how large the deposit is. Either way you get a record, a reminder if they stall, and a clear signal to order materials, which is worth considerably more than the difference in fees.

If you're also collecting details from new customers at the same time, the forms feature is on the free plan too, and it's worth reading what you can legally ask on an intake form in Canada before you build one. The full plan breakdown, including which features sit where, is on the pricing page.