Sometimes my most mundane articles prove most helpful to some readers. Today I’m going with mundane.

We have three locations with conference rooms. We have no offices and minimal staff on-site. When our lawyers are meeting with a client, they are often the only representative of our firm on the premises. Some of those meetings involve collecting payments from clients, especially at initial consultations.

There are lots of ways to deal with payments. You may already have a better approach than we do. But I’ll tell you what we’re doing, in case you find it helpful.

Mostly, we get paid in three ways. Some clients pay us with credit cards. Some pay with checks, and some pay with cash.

Credit cards: We have a credit card swiping machine in each location. These machines connect to the Internet and print a receipt. They are the standard machine you see in many stores and are provided to us by the company that handles our merchant account. We didn’t have to pay for the machines. Theoretically, we could use a portable device like Square with a Smartphone, but the rates are about double what we’re paying for the old-fashioned swiper. Sometimes we take credit card payments by phone and simply key in the card info. We pay a higher rate for these “card not present” transactions.

Checks: Our credit card machine also accommodates checks. We can run the check through the machine, and it magically deposits the funds into our account without charging us a fee. It’s sweet. Sometimes we get checks that can’t be run through the machine (certified or bank checks). In those instances, we have our attorneys send the check to our main office via FedEx. We deposit the check into the bank. Thankfully, we have a bank branch in our building. We also take check by phone using CheckWriter software.

Cash: We receive a fair amount of cash, especially for initial consultations. Generally, we have the attorney keep the cash and authorize us to draft the amount from the attorney’s personal checking account. We do the draft using check-writing software, CheckWriter, so that we can do the transaction without the physical check. Sometimes we’ll ask an attorney to run the cash by a local branch of our bank, and sometimes (keep this a secret) we FedEx the cash to our main office.

Payment by Phone: In some instances, we have clients pay by phone. This usually happens when clients decide to retain us a week or two later and prefer not to stop by to make payment. We’re set up to do credit cards by phone (at a higher “card not present” rate) or take checks by phone using CheckWriter. Our goal is to help a client make a payment without any hassle at all.

A friend of mine recently explained that, in his remote offices, he doesn’t have a credit card machine, so he has people pay in advance over the phone. That’s convenient and, as a by-product, has dramatically reduced his no-show rate. That’s a pretty good by-product, huh?

For many years, we avoided having our attorneys deal with collecting payments personally. There was always an administrative person available to handle taking payment and to issue a receipt. For some reason, we thought it unprofessional to deal with the payment ourselves. At some point, due to necessity, our attorneys got involved in dealing with the payment and shockingly, the world didn’t stop spinning. Attorneys asked for payment and clients handed over the cash, checks, and credit cards. It wasn’t nearly as awkward and uncomfortable as we worried that it might be. We changed our system, and life went on.

Are you doing something different? Got any good ideas to make this easier? Put your input in the comments below so we can all learn from you.