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Consider the scenario where a tutor is charging a student $100 for solving an assignment.
So the tutor takes $50 as a token before starting and rest $50 when it’s done.
A way to communicate this to the student is:
What are the alternatives ways of communicating the same? I looked at the synonyms for token but couldn’t find an appropriate word. Also, is the above use of word token correct or appropriate?
"Upfront" is the word I most commonly see used for this. You can use "upfront payment" if you're looking for a noun.
Upfront: paid or obtained in advance
As in:
So the tutor asks for $50 upfront and the remaining $50 upon completion.
Or:
So the tutor asks for an upfront payment of $50 and the remaining $50 to be paid upon completion.
This is a bit informal and may seem somewhat out of place in a contract or formal agreement, for example. In such cases I would probably expect to see something like "initial payment" or the details of when it should be paid written out without any single word or term used to describe it (e.g. "$50 to be paid prior to the commencement of the service").
Such a payment made in advance of an anticipated complete transaction is often termed an advance
Advance = money paid before something happens
The term has slightly less formal contractual overtones than the equally useful and very similar
Deposit = to pay someone an amount of money when you make an agreement with that person to pay for or buy something, that either will be returned to you later, if the agreed arrangement is kept, or that forms part of the total payment
Would you please transfer $50 to my account, as a prepayment?
or
A 50% prepayment is required for this service.
prepay - "to pay for (something) before you receive or use it : to pay (something) before you are required to pay it."
prepayment also pre-payment - "the act of paying for something before you receive it, or the amount of the payment" "Send your order with pre-payment by cheque".
Certain establishments (hotels, travel agencies, hospitals, car rentals) would require a deposit, which is slightly different from prepayment.
When an author is writing a book, she or he may receive an
When a publisher is interested in acquiring a book manuscript, it usually offers the writer an advance against royalties, or advance for short.
An advance is a signing bonus that’s negotiated and paid to the author before the book is published.
(Source: Writer's Digest -- How Book Advances Work - A Simple Explanation for Writers)
While not a single word, the term is regularly used as one:
Advance and deposit, which appear in previously posted answers, are probably the best general-purpose terms for such payments, but some professionals, particularly lawyers, prefer to refer to them by the term retainer. A retainer can be either a payment for having the professional on standby, with an understanding that specific services will be paid for later, as they are rendered (a 'true retainer'), or a deposit for future services, from which the fees will be deducted as the services are rendered.
There are also the words "earnest" (no connection with other words so spelled) and "pledge". Maybe I would use "earnest" in this case, although these words are oftener used for a longer joint undertaking than an hour or twain of tutoring.
There is another case of early payment, in case of, say, a carpenter or plumber or such hired for a job, who also buys the material for it. For this, though, I would use the aforesaid expression "up front" and call it an up-front payment, payment up front for up-front costs.
A fixed or contingent payment above the regular salary is also called a bonus. Although I wouldn’t normally use this term for a tutor, an extra incentive paid to a new employee is a signing bonus.
It’s not clear from the question whether this is an extra one-time payment on top of the regular hourly fee, which would be a “bonus,” or a $50 advance on their regular salary, paid up front. The latter would not be called a “bonus.”
Because some commenters claim that it sounds odd to them to say a tutor gets a bonus, I’ll give a few of many examples I found in a quick search. Here’s a tutoring company that offers new tutors a “$10 bonus” for signing up. Here’s a posting for a company calles Tutor Time Childcare that offers a “$2,000 sign-on bonus.” Here’s a tutoring company that says “our compensation is performance/bonus based.”
