How to send before-and-after photos to customers (and get paid faster)

For most trades, the before-and-after photo is the job. Your customer wasn't home when you cleared the gutters, cut back the border or jet-washed the drive — the photo is the only version of the work they ever actually see. Get that photo in front of them well and you get paid faster, argue less, and win the next three houses on the street. Get it wrong and you're chasing an invoice for work nobody watched you do.

Here's the method that works, whether you do it by hand or let software do it for you.

1. Shoot the "before" before you touch anything

The single most common mistake is forgetting the before shot until you're half done. Make it the first thing that happens on site — before the kit comes off the van. A before photo taken after you've started is worthless as proof.

• Same angle, same framing, for both shots. If you can, stand on the same paving slab.
• Get the whole area in — a tight crop of one clean patch proves nothing.
• Shoot in landscape for driveways and frontages, portrait for gutters and downpipes.

2. Line the "after" up with the "before"

Matched angles are what make the pair land. A before-and-after where the camera moved three feet reads as two unrelated photos; a matched pair reads as proof. This is fiddly to do from memory, which is exactly why Elivium's in-app camera ghosts the before photo faintly over your viewfinder as you line up the after — you just match the shot to the outline and shoot.

3. Caption what you did, not what they can see

The photo shows the result. The caption should add the bit the photo can't: what was wrong, what you removed, what to watch for. "Cleared 4no. downpipes, moss build-up removed from the north-facing run, no damage to the fascia" is worth ten "all done!"s. This is the part crews skip because it's admin — so it's the part worth automating.

A timestamped before/after with a line of notes ends the conversation before it starts. Nobody queries an invoice they can see the work behind.

4. Send one link, not an attachment

Do not text five JPEGs. They arrive out of order, compressed, with no context, and they're impossible to forward. Send a single link to a clean, branded page: before/after pairs, your notes, the date, your logo. That page is forwardable — to a landlord, an insurer, a neighbour who's been eyeing the same job. A page sells; a camera-roll dump doesn't.

5. Send the pay link with the proof

The moment a customer is looking at proof the work is done is the moment they're most willing to pay. So send the pay link in the same message as the report, not in a separate email two days later. Proof and a way to pay, arriving together, is how "I'll sort it later" turns into "paid".

Doing it automatically

You can run all five steps by hand — a decent camera, a shared drive, a captions habit and a payment link. Most trades don't, because on a busy day the admin is the first thing to slip. Elivium takes most of it off your plate: crews shoot before/after in the app, and on Pro AI drafts the notes and one tap builds the branded report. Marking the visit complete raises the invoice into your Stripe automatically, so the report link and the pay link can go out together. Proof is the part we built Elivium around.