The questions tradies actually ask

Your customer pays for each stage of the job upfront, before you pick up a tool. Stagex holds that money securely. When you finish that stage and they sign it off, the money for that stage hits your bank. No invoice chasing, no 30-day terms, no hoping they're good for it.

When the customer approves a milestone (or the review window expires without a complaint), funds land in your account within 48 hours. That's it. No net-30, no excuses, no "the cheque's in the mail".

The money for the milestones they've already funded is already collected and held by Stagex — they can't claw it back. If they go silent, the dispute timer kicks in and you upload your evidence. If they don't respond inside the review window, the funds release to you automatically.

The 1.6% escrow fee comes out of the milestone amount when it's released to you — so technically it's the tradie. But because card surcharges in Australia are capped under the RBA rules and our flat 1.6% covers card, bank transfer and PayTo, most tradies just price it into the quote. There's no escrow fee on jobs under $30k.

You can if your accountant wants one for the books, and Stagex generates a tax invoice for every released milestone automatically. But you don't need to send a chase-up invoice to get paid — the milestone sign-off IS the payment trigger.

Yes — and that's the point. They can see every milestone, every photo, every sign-off in their portal. They approve releases one stage at a time. For a homeowner spending $80k on a renovation, that's a lot more comfort than handing over a 30% deposit and crossing their fingers.

A live view of the job: which milestones are funded, which are in progress, which are awaiting their sign-off, and how much is currently held. Photos and notes you upload show up against the right milestone. They can also raise a dispute from there if something's wrong.

All three. Card (Visa/Mastercard/Amex) via Stripe, bank transfer (PayID/BSB), and PayTo for recurring milestone deposits. The 1.6% all-in fee is the same regardless of method — we don't surcharge cards differently.

Then the job runs the old way — you invoice, they pay, you hope. Stagex doesn't force escrow on anyone. But in our experience, once a customer hears "your deposit is paid upfront and held securely until you sign off", they're more comfortable, not less.

Whatever you and the customer agreed on when you set the milestone up. Stagex prompts you to write the completion criteria into the quote — things like "slab poured and cured", "electrical rough-in passed inspection", "final coat applied". Vague milestones cause disputes, so be specific.

You both get 10 business days to upload evidence — photos, sign-off forms, inspection certificates, messages, whatever you've got. No open-ended back-and-forth. The funds stay frozen in trust until it's resolved — they're not refunded to the customer, and they're not released to you.

Stagex runs a structured mediation in the first instance, with a 10-business-day window for both sides to upload evidence. If it can't be resolved there, both parties keep their normal legal options — Stagex isn't a substitute for those.

Yes. Every event on a Stagex job — milestone setup, photos, sign-offs, messages, payments — is timestamped and stored in a tamper-evident hash chain. You can export a court-admissible PDF of the whole job history at any time. Solicitors love it because it saves them a week of reconstructing the timeline.

Payments are collected upfront through Stripe and held securely by Stagex until each milestone is signed off. We don't currently hold funds through a separate, licensed third-party trustee — see our trust & security page for the full detail on what that does and doesn't mean.

We're upfront that we don't currently operate through a licensed third-party trustee, so open milestone funds aren't legally ring-fenced from Stagex the way a regulated trust account would be. We'd rather tell you that plainly than imply a protection that isn't there yet.

Card and bank payments are processed through Stripe, a certified Australian payments provider. Stagex is working on strengthening the custody arrangements around milestone funds — see our trust & security page for where that stands today.

Card payments are processed by Stripe, which is PCI DSS Level 1 certified — the highest tier. Stagex itself never sees or stores your customer's full card number; we only ever see the last four digits and a tokenised reference. Data is hosted in Supabase's Sydney region, encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS 1.3 in transit.