Pay on Invoice for Approved Customers

Offer Invoiced at your online checkout to the customers you have agreed credit terms with, and only to them. Everyone else on the same form pays in advance or by card.

Why you would use this

When a customer picks Invoiced, no payment is taken at checkout: the order comes through, you send the quote, and they pay your invoice on their usual terms. That is right for account customers and wrong for a stranger placing their first order. Until now the choice was all or nothing: either every visitor could pick Invoiced, or none of them could.

Now Invoiced can be reserved for approved customers. A regular you have set up on account still ticks Invoiced and carries on as before. A new customer never sees it, and pays another way.

How it works

Two switches work together, one on the order form and one on the customer:

1. Only approved customers can choose Invoiced, on the order form’s payment methods. This tells the form to hide Invoiced from anyone you have not approved.
2. Can pay on invoice, on the customer record. This is your approval for one named business.

Puree only knows who is ordering when they are signed in to your customer portal, so a customer sees Invoiced when all three are true: the form reserves it, they are signed in, and the customer their contact belongs to is ticked Can pay on invoice. A visitor who is not signed in is never approved, however they fill in the details, because there is no way to know who they are.

1. Reserve Invoiced on the order form

Open Online → Order Forms, choose the form, then Manage → Settings and scroll to Payment methods.

1. Make sure Invoiced is ticked.
2. Tick Only approved customers can choose Invoiced underneath it.
3. Make sure at least one other method is ticked as well: Pay in advance or Pay by card (Stripe).
4. Save the form.

The second method is required, and Puree will not let you save without one. With Invoiced reserved, a customer you have not approved has nothing else to pick on an invoiced-only form, so they could not order at all. The approval tick stays greyed out until a fallback method is on, so you find out before saving rather than after.

2. Approve a customer

Open Customers and choose the customer. Beside the customer’s name is a Can pay on invoice card with a switch. Turn it on. It saves straight away, and the card records who enabled it and on what date, because it is a credit decision rather than a preference.

The same switch is on the customer’s edit form under Payment terms, so you can set it while creating a customer. Turning it off clears the recorded name and date, so a withdrawn decision never sits next to a live one.

Approval belongs to the customer, the company or individual you cater for, not to a contact. Every contact of an approved customer who can sign in to the portal gets Invoiced at checkout, and a contact linked to several customers is approved if any one of them is.

3. Make sure the contact can sign in

Because approval is only recognised when the customer is signed in, the contact needs portal access. Check the contact has This contact can sign in to the customer portal ticked, and that their email address is the one they will use. See Customer Portal for setting the portal up and choosing who can sign in.

At the order form the customer chooses Sign in, enters their email and follows the link that arrives. That link is what proves they are who they say they are.

What the customer sees

Approved and signed in. The Payment method section shows Invoiced alongside the other methods, and Invoiced is already selected for them. They can still pick another method if they prefer.

Not approved, or not signed in. Invoiced is simply not there. If one other method is on, there is nothing to choose and the checkout explains what will happen, such as “Our payment details will be provided to you before delivery of your order”. If card is the only method left, the button reads Continue to Payment and takes them to Stripe.

Hiding the option is not the only safeguard. When the order is submitted Puree checks the chosen method against what that customer was actually offered, so a form post naming Invoiced from an unapproved customer is refused rather than quietly booked on account.

Checking an order

Open the order in Online → Orders Received and look under Payment & Instructions. The Payment terms line shows what the customer chose, exactly as it does for any other online order. See Online Order Form Payment Methods for the three payment methods in full, and Processing Online Orders for turning the order into a quote.

Related

• Online Order Form Payment Methods — Invoiced, Pay in advance and Pay by card, and how they combine
• Customer Portal — enabling the portal and giving contacts access to sign in
• Customers, Contacts & Addresses — where the customer record and its contacts live