You are standing in your hallway. It is four in the morning. But at least water from the burst pipe in your attic no longer cascades through the ceiling above your head.

You are about to bid farewell to the emergency plumber. And, tired and distraught as you are, you know the parting will be anything but inexpensive.

Taking out his mobile phone, a BlackBerry Curve, the plumber asks you for your credit card.

“I’m just going to enter your details,” he says.

A few keypresses later, he hands you his handset.

“If you could just key in your three digit security code.”

You do so. You return his phone, one more key is pressed, and that’s it. An unpleasantly large sum of money has just been debited from your credit card.

Nor is it simply plumbers who could soon use their phones to extract payment in this way. Builders, taxi drivers, delivery people – all are amongst those ready to take advantage.

Because in the United States Intuit, developers of the highly popular QuickBooks accountancy software programme, have just launched GoPayment, a downloadable application that currently works on 11 models of handset, including the Motorola Razr and the BlackBerry Curve.

Significantly, apart from the phone, the software requires no other hardware such as an external card-swipe device or printer.

All a user has to do is enter the card number, expiration date, and other data from the customer’s card into data fields that appear on their handset screen.

Intuit expects GoPayment will appeal to many cash-strapped recession-hit small businesses otherwise unable to easily offer electronic payment facilities to their customers. Those businesses will have to open an account with Intuit Payment Solutions, and Intuit will levy a small fee on each transaction.

However, assuming that all security concerns have been successfully addressed, and there is no reason to suppose they have not, GoPayment could also prove popular on this side of the pond.

The only immediate disadvantage for those previously opting to take their payment in cash is the audit trail GoPayment creates, which Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs inevitably will be able to access.

As for those of us who will be paying the bills, we’re likely to appreciate the convenience of not having to carry cash or write a cheque.

We might also be grateful when, having had one pint too many in the pub, we need a cab to get home but no longer have the price in our pocket, having already removed what few funds remained in our bank account through the hole-in-the-wall earlier in the evening.

By using our credit card we can at least defer payment until our next statement falls due.

It’s hard to think that GoPayment is anything other than a good idea. Perhaps the only surprise is that it did not appear first as an App for the iPhone.