Taking a card is not the hard part any more. Any payments company will sell you a reader and an app this afternoon and you will be charging cards by Friday. If that is the whole question, you do not need anything on this page.
The reason mechanics end up taking the card inside their job software instead is quieter: the payment lands on the job. You know which invoice it settled, what is still outstanding, and who owes you for a job you finished three weeks ago. A payment taken in a separate app is money in the bank and a reconciliation problem in the evening.
So this page ranks thirteen job systems by how they actually collect the money, starting with the one thing twelve of them cannot do at all. Fixty publishes this page and is fourth, because Fixty has no card reader and does not claim one.
One entry is worth flagging before you read the list. Trackara Pro is first on our page about the best app for a mobile mechanic and eleventh here, because their own roadmap still lists card payment inside the invoice as work in progress. A product that wins one page and loses another is what an honest comparison looks like; a product that wins every page is a page that was written backwards.
What is not on this list
The biggest omission on this page is deliberate. A standalone card reader from a payments company, with its own app, is a completely legitimate answer to this question and is what a lot of mobile mechanics actually use. We hold no sourced dataset on those products, so they are named nowhere and ranked nowhere, rather than being dismissed with a sentence somebody wrote from memory.
Cash, bank transfer arranged by text, and the payment apps people already have on their phones are also real answers and are also not ranked here, for the same reason.
Nothing on this page ranks processing rates, because the sourced dataset behind it has no cell for them. It records what these companies publish about features, plans and subscription prices, not what anybody charges per transaction, and the same gap applies to Fixty. See the section below before you treat any subscription price here as the cost of taking a card.
It does not rank on how quickly money settles, or on whether a vendor holds funds on a new account. Both decide whether you can buy parts for the next job, both vary by the processor underneath rather than by the software on top, and neither is published by anybody here.
One card reader between thirteen companies
Search all twelve competitors for hardware and you find one sentence. Shopmonkey: collect payments in person with a Shopmonkey card reader, or remotely by sending your customer a secure payment link. ServiceTitan says get paid in the field without saying with what. Trackara Pro says the card tap inside the invoice is being finished, which is a promise rather than a product. Everyone else, Fixty included, describes a link.
For most mobile repair work the link is genuinely fine. The customer approves the estimate on their phone, the invoice arrives on the same phone, and the card details go in while you are packing up. Nobody has to find a card.
The newer, cheaper tools do not change that picture and in one case make it worse. QuoteIQ, ARI, Orderry and Deelo all describe an online payment on a link, the same mechanism as everybody else. Trackara Pro takes a deposit at booking and is still finishing the payment at the end of the job. Mobile Mechanic Hub publishes nothing about it at all. Paying less does not buy you a card reader from anybody.
It stops being fine in two situations, and both of them happen. An older customer who pays with a physical card and does not want to type it into anything. And a driveway with no signal, where the link will not load and you are not leaving with the money. If either of those is a regular part of your week, the honest advice is either Shopmonkey, or a standalone reader from a payments company alongside whatever job software you use, and this page ranks the second option nowhere because we have no sourced data on it.
Nobody here publishes what taking the card actually costs
Every price on this page is a software subscription. None of it is the cost of taking a card, which is a percentage of every job you do and which will, over a year, be larger than the subscription for most working mechanics.
No processing rate appears anywhere in the sourced dataset this page is built from, for any of the thirteen, Fixty included. That is a limit of the research rather than an accusation, and it means every entry above is comparing the smaller of the two bills. Two vendors do at least name the processor underneath, Orderry and QuoteIQ, which tells you whose published rate card to go and read.
So make the processing rate the second question on any call, right after which plan includes what. Ask for the percentage, the fixed amount per transaction, whether cards typed in by hand cost more than cards tapped, and how long the money takes to arrive. Those four answers will separate these products more sharply than anything ranked above.
Why take the card inside the job software at all
It is worth being clear about what the subscription is buying, because on this specific question it is not much. A standalone payments app takes a card faster than any of these, with less setup and a rate you can read on their website.
What it does not do is know which invoice was paid. The mechanic who takes cards in a separate app spends an evening a month matching amounts to jobs from memory, and quietly loses one, and then stops chasing the ones that are late because working out which ones are late is itself the chore.
That is the entire argument for criterion three, and it is why it sits above the payment methods rather than below them. The value is not in the card being taken. It is in the job being marked paid without anybody doing it by hand.
If Fixty is the one that fits
Fixty is a CRM for one mobile mechanic: estimates approved by text, photo inspections, scheduling and card payments, all from a phone. Starter is $99/mo and Growth is $149/mo, both with the same 14 day free trial, and if one of the products above suits your work better, buy that one instead.
Try Fixty free for 14 days