One of the most important parts of GrownBy is the ability to view and manage your customers’ invoices. This article will show you how to:
- View past and future invoices
- Check for and encourage customers to pay past due invoices
- Export your invoice data to CSV in an item by item format, or in an order by order format
- Sort invoices by payment method, such as when you are trying to determine or report on SNAP/EBT payments, etc.
Viewing Invoices
If you’re looking for all invoices, you should navigate to the Invoices tab on your dashboard:
Next, edit the date filter to include the range of dates you want to view (this can include past and future invoices). You can search by customer email or invoice number, or simply look at the list to view which payments are due. You can also sort by Payment Method. If you have many invoices to view, exporting a CSV and sorting by "Status" may be easiest.
Adjusting an Invoice
You can adjust an invoice and add a note that indicates the reason you made the adjustment. You can only adjust invoices down, not up. Only invoices that are unpaid can be adjusted. You may want to use this feature if you have received a partial payment from a customer (for example, cash or check). To do so, go to Invoices and find the invoice you need to adjust. On the right, there is an Actions column. If the invoice is not paid, "..." will appear in that column. Click on the "..." and select Adjust invoice:
In the pop-up, enter your Adjustment Amount and Adjustment Reason (you may want to include a check number here, if relevant) and click Submit:
The Invoices Report
The invoices report shows the following columns:
- Invoice Number – ID for the invoice. Each payment has its own invoice so there can be multiple invoices for one order (when a customer chooses weekly or monthly installment payments for a share or when a customer orders items in advance for different dates and opts to pay for them on the day of delivery). Clicking on the invoice number will open a view of the invoice.
- Order Number – ID for the order. Similarly, there can be one order covered by more than one invoice. Clicking on the order number will take you to the details of that order.
- Name – Customer name. Clicking on this will take you to the customer’s detail page.
- Amount – Invoice total
- Due Date
- Method – Card, Offline, or EBT
- Status – Either paid (credit card payment or marked paid by the farm admin in GrownBy), due (could be an offline payment that has yet to be marked paid), failed (card on file was attempted but did not succeed), or refunded (will show the amount refunded in parentheses.
- Action (see action section below)– This is how you can refund if the invoice is paid or, if unpaid, click the three dots to access the options to Charge (charge the card on file), Mark as paid (if the invoice is Offline), or Void the invoice.
- Link – The link is either to the receipt (if paid) or the invoice with payment options (if unpaid). You can send this link to your customer if you need them to pay an invoice.
You can also navigate to the associated order from an invoice’s page by clicking on the order number. This may be especially helpful if a customer has more than one order and invoice. Note that clicking on an order number will take you out of the invoices page and if you were in a filtered view, you'll need to reset the filters when you return.
You can also view invoices for a particular customer or order through those pages, respectively. Each customer page contains an invoices section. And at the bottom of each order page is a list of invoices related to that order.
Viewing Future Invoices
You can view future invoices for an individual customer on that customer’s page under the invoices section. To view future invoices in bulk (those not yet due), select Custom from the first drop down in the date picker and then set the date range as needed:
The Action Column on the Invoices Tab
The action column allows you to perform important functions for a particular invoice.
If the invoice is paid, this column shows the action “Refund”. Clicking refund opens a pop-up window that looks like this:
From this view, you can choose how you would like to refund the invoice. You may issue a refund to a customer through Stripe, Farm Credit or EBT, depending on how the invoice was paid. You can choose to include tips and fees (if applicable) and add a note to indicate the circumstances of the refund for future reference.
Additional Notes on Refunds
You can issue a partial refund, simply by entering less than the invoice amount into one of the fields on the pop-up.
- You can split credit card refunds between farm credit and credit card.
- EBT payments can only be refunded to EBT
- Offline payments cannot be refunded to credit card but can be marked refunded in GrownBy. You will have to manually process the refund or manually adjust the shopper's farm credit in the amount of the refund (via the Customer Detail page).
- When you issue a refund, the customer will receive a notification.
If the invoice has not been paid, the Actions column will display three dots. Clicking those three dots displays a menu that gives the options to "Charge," "Adjust Invoice," “Mark as Paid,” or “Void” the invoice. The "Charge" option will only appear if there is a card associated with the invoice.
Clicking “Mark as Paid” makes this pop-up appear:
Clicking “Void” will make the invoice no longer due or considered in your sales totals (you can later undo this action if you need to) and this pop-up will appear:
Past Due Invoices
There are a couple of ways to look at past due invoices on GrownBy. You can either look directly at the Invoices page of your dashboard or you can export your invoices to csv and look at them that way.
Clicking “View all Past Due” will show all invoices that are due, including ones that have a payment that didn’t go through.
In a customer’s page, any customer with one or more invoices due will appear with the Payment Due tag next to their name:
What to do next?
Once you know which invoices are past due you have a few options. If there is a credit card associated with the invoice, you can click the three dots in the Action column and charge the invoice against the customer’s card.
If you need to send a reminder to the customer to pay, you can copy and paste the invoice link into an email to the customer using the Link column:
You can also use the send message function in GrownBy by navigating to the customer’s account and clicking “Send Message”:
You can then copy the invoice link into the message. When you send a message from GrownBy, the system sends a copy to your farm admin email account as well for record keeping
Our recommendation is to establish a weekly system for checking and following up about past-due invoices. The SOP below can be printed and posted near your office computer for reference.
Adding an Invoice
In GrownBy, you can create invoices or orders for customers. It is important to understand the difference between adding an invoice (which is not connected to Products) and an order (which has specific products attached to it).
Important: Invoices that are independent of products cannot be paid by EBT because of SNAP/EBT regulations.
To create an invoice for your customer, go to the customer's page and scroll down to the Invoices section. Click "New Invoice" which will open this pop-up:
Export
There are two options for exporting invoice CSV files from GrownBy: Summary and Detail. The Summary CSV puts each invoice in its own row and the detail puts each item from the invoice–including fees– on its own row. So, you can choose the CSV you need depending on whether you’re looking for information that is specific to an invoice or specific to the items within that invoice.
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