Taking Deposits Online for Garage Door Jobs Without Double Entry

A deposit exists because you are about to order material against a customer’s word, not their signature. Springs, cables, an opener, maybe a full door: once you place that order with a distributor, the job is committed on your end whether the homeowner has second thoughts or not. A deposit is what turns “we agreed on the phone” into a real commitment on both sides, and it is one of the simplest pieces of a garage door business to run online instead of chasing down with a phone call.

This guide is for the shop owner or office manager who wants to send a payment link on an approved estimate, watch the deposit clear, and have it show up in QuickBooks as one transaction instead of something someone re-types later. It compares Stripe and Square for taking the payment, and covers what actually needs to happen on the QuickBooks Online side so the deposit lands where it belongs instead of sitting in an unlabeled pile of Undeposited Funds.

One disclosure before the comparison: Garage Door Lead Engine does not sell payment processing or accounting software, so we have no stake in whether you pick Stripe or Square. We do care about the process, though. A stalled deposit is a stalled job, and the estimate-to-cash gap sits right next to the lead-to-booked-work path we build software around for other reasons. That is the angle this guide comes from, not a pitch for either processor.

Which one you should probably pick

For most single-location door shops taking occasional deposits online, start with Stripe. Its published online rate is lower than Square’s free-plan rate as of this writing, and its ACH option is capped low enough to matter on a real job, covered in the pricing table below. Stripe has no built-in appointment booking or in-truck card reader, so if you also want an online booking flow for estimate appointments, you will pair it with a separate tool, not Stripe itself.

Pick Square instead if you already run a Square reader or Square Appointments in the truck for card-present work and do not want a second vendor for online deposits, or if simplifying the QuickBooks side matters more to you than the lowest possible rate: Square has a direct, Intuit-built connector that Stripe does not have on its own. That convenience comes at a cost that changed recently, covered in the challenging-pick section below, and it is worth doing the breakeven math before assuming Square is the simpler choice by default.

If the job is large enough that a deposit alone will not close the sale, for example a full opener-and-door replacement running into the thousands, that is a financing conversation, not a deposit one. Point-of-sale financing is a different tool built for that situation.

What each one actually costs

Prices below are as published by each vendor, checked August 28, 2026. Square’s own pricing page did not display its rate figures on the checks behind this article, most likely because the numbers load dynamically in the browser rather than sitting in the page text, so the Square row comes from third-party rate-tracking sites and should be confirmed directly on squareup.com before you treat it as final.

Tool	Published price	Best at	Where it gets hard
Stripe	Online 2.9% + 30 cents domestic; in-person 2.7% + 5 cents; ACH Direct Debit 0.8%, capped at $5; standalone invoicing 0.4%, capped at $2 (checked 2026-08-28)	The lowest published online rate here, and the cheapest way to collect a large deposit through ACH	No native QuickBooks sync. Getting the deposit into QuickBooks automatically needs a bridge app or a Zapier flow, which is its own monthly cost and its own point of failure
Square	Free plan: online and invoice 3.3% + 30 cents, raised from 2.9% + 30 cents on January 13, 2026; in-person 2.6% + 15 cents. Plus plan, $49 per month per location, drops online and invoice to 2.9% + 30 cents. Premium plan, $149 per month per location, same online rate with a lower in-person rate. Not confirmed directly on squareup.com as of this check	One account for the card reader in the truck, online invoicing, and a built-in QuickBooks connector	The free plan’s online rate is no longer the cheapest option here. Buying it down with Plus or Premium only pays off above a volume line, covered below
QuickBooks Online	Simple Start $38 per month, Essentials $85 per month, Plus $140 per month, Advanced $340 per month, new rates for subscriptions renewing on or after August 1, 2026	The ledger every payment eventually needs to land in, and the only tiers (Plus and Advanced) with job-level class tracking	QuickBooks Payments’ own processing rate could not be confirmed from a reliable source as of this writing, so this guide treats QuickBooks Online as the books, not the processor

Before you start

• A bank account for payouts, plus basic business verification on hand: EIN, owner ID, and business address, whichever processor you choose.
• A QuickBooks Online subscription already set up with your Products/Services items matching what you actually invoice for. If that mapping is not done yet, syncing a field service tool with QuickBooks covers the item and class setup this deposit workflow depends on.
• A decision about who sends the deposit link on an approved estimate: the estimator, the office, or the software doing it automatically. A workflow with no owner does not get used consistently.
• If your flat-rate price book already ties a standard deposit amount or percentage to a job type, confirm it before building the link into your process, so the number on the link always matches what was quoted.
• If you plan to connect Stripe to QuickBooks automatically, have the bridge app or Zapier account ready before you need it live.

Setting up Stripe to take the deposit

1. Create a Stripe account and complete business verification: EIN, bank account, and owner ID. This can take a few business days if any document is incomplete or hard to read.
2. Under Settings, then Payment methods, turn on ACH Direct Debit alongside cards, so the cheaper option exists for anyone taking a deposit on a larger job.
3. For a single job, create a Payment Link or a Stripe Invoice, name the deposit amount, and attach it to the customer and job. A Payment Link works well for a link sent by text. An Invoice suits email and gives the customer a formal document to keep.
4. Send the link as part of approving the estimate, not as a follow-up sent days later. The opinion aside below explains why that timing matters more than the rate.
5. Connect Stripe to QuickBooks Online through a bridge app, Synder is a common choice, or a Zapier flow that creates a matching QuickBooks transaction when the Stripe payment posts. Stripe does not write to QuickBooks on its own.
6. In QuickBooks, apply the deposit against the customer’s estimate or invoice rather than letting it sit in Undeposited Funds. If you use class tracking, available on Plus or Advanced only, assign it to the right job or division at the same time, not later.
7. Run one real test transaction, small enough to refund without a second thought, through the entire chain before relying on it for a paying customer.

Setting up Square instead

1. Create a free Square account and verify the same business details Stripe asks for: bank account, EIN, owner ID, and business address.
2. If you also want card-present payments in the truck, order a Square Reader or Terminal. Skip this step if you only need the online deposit link.
3. Turn on Square Invoices so you can send a payment link on an approved estimate the same way described for Stripe above.
4. Turn on ACH as a payment method on the invoice if you want the cheaper option available for a larger deposit.
5. Connect Square to QuickBooks Online using Intuit’s own Square connector rather than a third-party bridge. Look for it from the Square dashboard’s app or integrations settings, since the exact menu location can shift between updates.
6. Run one small test transaction through the full chain, the same way you tested Stripe, before relying on it for a paying customer.

The challenging one: Square

Square is genuinely the easiest processor to start with. One account gets you a card reader for the truck, free online invoicing, and a direct, Intuit-built connector into QuickBooks that Stripe cannot match without a third-party bridge. That is a real advantage, and it is a fair reason a lot of door shops already run on it.

What has changed, and what most owners have not sat down and calculated, is the cost of the free plan’s online rate. On January 13, 2026, Square raised the free-plan online and invoice rate from 2.9% plus 30 cents to 3.3% plus 30 cents, while in-person stayed at 2.6% plus 15 cents. That is a real increase on exactly the kind of transaction this guide is about: an online deposit link, not a card swiped in the truck.

Square’s Plus plan, $49 per month per location, buys that online rate back down to 2.9% plus 30 cents, the same figure Stripe publishes with no monthly fee at all. The breakeven math is straightforward: the rate gap is 0.4 percentage points (3.3% minus 2.9%). Divide the $49 subscription by that 0.4%, and a shop needs to process roughly $12,250 a month in online deposits and invoices through Square before Plus pays for itself. Below that volume, staying on the free plan and paying the higher percentage costs less than the subscription does. Premium, at $149 per month per location, needs a considerably higher volume to clear the same math.

None of this makes Square the wrong choice. A shop that wants one vendor for the truck reader and the online link, and that already clears the volume threshold, gets real value out of Plus. A shop below that threshold, or one that only occasionally sends a deposit link, is paying for convenience it is not using enough to justify. Work out your own volume before assuming either direction is obviously correct for your shop.

What usually goes wrong

• The office keeps entering payments manually in QuickBooks while techs also collect through the payment app. This recreates the exact problem an integration was supposed to solve. Pick one system of record for the payment and hold to it.
• The item names on the estimate do not match the item names in QuickBooks. A renamed or recategorized item on either side is a commonly reported way that a synced integration quietly starts creating a duplicate item instead of matching the existing one, which then misstates revenue on reports. Check this directly against whatever bridge tool you use, since the exact behavior varies by connector.
• A deposit sits in Undeposited Funds instead of getting applied to the job. It is not lost money, but it is invisible on job-level reporting until someone manually matches it, which usually happens in a batch weeks later, not the day it was paid.
• The deposit link goes out days after the estimate is approved, not the same conversation. The processing rate on the link almost never costs a shop as much as the delay in sending it does.
• A brand-new processing account gets promised to a customer as same-day money. Early account holds are common enough that this promise gets broken more often than it should.

How to tell it is working

In week one, send a real test deposit link to a phone or email you control, pay it, and confirm two things: that it shows as paid inside Stripe or Square within minutes, and that it reaches QuickBooks as a matched transaction against the right customer and job, not as a manual entry someone still has to fix by hand. If the QuickBooks side needs a person to intervene every time, the connection is not actually finished yet.

In month one, check whether Undeposited Funds is clearing on a regular schedule instead of growing, and whether deposit links are going out consistently at the point of estimate approval rather than in a batch once a week. If you turned on ACH, look at whether any customers are actually choosing it on larger jobs. If nobody is, the option is probably not visible enough at checkout, not that customers prefer paying more in card fees.