Getting paid on invoice terms
The finance playbook for selling on Net-N: deciding who gets credit, setting terms that stick, chasing what's late, and reconciling what arrives.
Selling on terms means shipping before you have the money. This playbook covers the decisions that keeps that from turning into a receivables problem — who you extend credit to, what terms they get, and what happens when payment doesn’t arrive.
Decide who gets terms
Invoice terms are gated by an allowlist. A customer is either approved for Net-N or they are not; approving them is a credit decision, not a checkout setting.
Be deliberate about that decision, because Throttle does not yet enforce a per-customer credit limit. The allowlist is binary: once a buyer is on it, they can place an order of any size on terms. If you are extending credit at meaningful volume, your ceiling has to live in your own process until that gap closes.
Set the terms
Net-N is the number of days a buyer has to pay after the invoice is issued. It resolves from four places, first one set wins:
| Precedence | Source |
|---|---|
| 1 | A term negotiated and accepted on a quote |
| 2 | The customer’s default |
| 3 | A term set on the cart |
| 4 | Your global default (30 unless configured) |
A negotiated term beating the account default is deliberate, and it exists because the alternative caused real damage: a quote issued and accepted at Net-60 was being invoiced at the customer’s standing Net-7, billing the buyer 53 days before they had agreed to pay.
Valid values run 0 to 365. Zero is legitimate and means due on issue. It is not the same as leaving the field empty — empty falls through to the next source, 0 means due now. Full detail in Invoice terms (Net-N).
Terms freeze at issue
An issued invoice keeps the terms it was issued with. Changing a customer’s default afterwards affects their next invoice and leaves history alone.
This matters when you are reconciling something months old: the invoice carries the term that applied on the day it went out, not today’s. It also means you cannot fix a wrong due date by editing the customer — that is a credit or a reissue.
Chase what’s late
Receivables age into standard buckets, and Throttle sends overdue reminders automatically. The judgment calls that stay yours:
- When to stop shipping. An overdue invoice does not block a new order. If a buyer is 60 days late and ordering again, nothing in the system will stop it.
- When to escalate. The aging report tells you what is late; it does not tell you which accounts are worth chasing hard.
- When to write it off. There is no bad-debt or write-off flow today, so a genuinely uncollectable invoice has to be handled as a credit or reconciled outside Throttle.
Reconcile what arrives
Money can reach you through the processor or entirely outside it — a wire, a cheque, an ACH your bank tells you about before we do.
Payments that arrive outside Throttle need recording against the invoice, or your receivables will overstate what is owed. Bear in mind there is no partial-payment concept against a single invoice yet: a buyer paying half of a large invoice cannot be recorded as half-paid, so that has to be handled deliberately rather than assumed.
When a buyer disputes an invoice
Flag the payment as disputed. This does not chase anyone or open a case — it marks the money as contested so it stops counting as clean revenue in your reporting while you work it out.
Clearing the flag later leaves the reason and the date on the record on purpose, so the history of the dispute survives even after it is resolved.
The monthly loop
- Review the aging report. Anything past its bucket needs an owner.
- Check unapplied payments — money in, not yet matched to an invoice.
- Reconcile against your bank. Throttle knows about what it processed; it does not know about the wire that landed on Friday.
- Review who is on the terms allowlist. Accounts that have gone quiet or slow should come off before they order again, not after.