Wholesale and Retail invoices are handled in different ways on GrownBy.
The reason why these two areas are handled differently is primarily because the expectations of wholesale and retail customers and sellers are different:
Key payment differences between retail and wholesale
1. Farmers expect retail customers to pay something in advance
Even if a deposit on a CSA share, farmers almost always expect payment for some of all of an order before it is delivered. The exception is with CSA shares, where some farms have a zero deposit for "reserving" a share early in the season.
2. Wholesale buyers never want to pay in advance
Generally speaking, wholesale buyers appreciate or expect terms. Those terms might be "cash on delivery", but they still want to see and assess the product before payment is made. The concept of terms recognizes that the buyer needs time to resell the items purchased before they can pay back the seller.
3. Wholesale buyers often work in teams
We frequently work with farms selling to restaurants or stores with multiple people handling the payment of invoices and placing of orders. We have designed GrownBy to be flexible enough to accommodate this type of team as well as more complex accounting systems.
How invoices are handled on GrownBy
1. Credit card or ACH payment
- Customer checks out and selects a credit card or ACH payment
- Invoice is created on order fulfillment (a manual fulfillment or on day of distribution)
- If there are no terms (0), the invoice will be charged on the day of fulfillment
- If there are terms, the invoice will be charged on the day of fulfillment plus the number of days set for terms. If an order was fulfilled on the 1st of the month with 15 day terms, the order would be charged on the 15th.
2. Offline payments
- Customer selects "Terms" or offline payment on checkout
- Invoice is created on fulfillment
- If there are no terms (0), the invoice will be sent and due on the day of fulfillment
- If there are terms, the invoice will be sent and due on the day of fulfillment plus the number of days set for terms. If an order was fulfilled on the 1st of the month with 15 day terms, the order would be charged on the 15th.