Offline Payment Methods
Cheques, bank transfer, purchase orders and paying in store, and how an unpaid order behaves.
Settings, Payment. Seven methods take no money at the moment of ordering: Check / Money Order, Bank Transfer / Wire, Cash on Delivery, Pay in Store, Pay by Phone, Purchase Order and Custom Payment.
They all behave the same way. The order is placed, stock is taken, the customer gets their confirmation, and the payment status stays unpaid until somebody marks it paid.
The Instructions Field Is Doing Real Work
Each method carries instructions, shown at the point of choosing and repeated in the confirmation email.
That text is where the cheque payee, the bank account details, the terms, or the sentence "we will invoice you within two working days" belong.
A method with no instructions generates email to you
Every customer who picks it will write and ask what happens next. Write three sentences once instead of answering the same question for a year.
What Unpaid Means Everywhere Else
An unpaid order is a real order. It appears in your order list, it has taken stock, and it can be processed and shipped.
What it is not is revenue. It does not count towards the dashboard figures, the sales reports, or the tax report, until it is marked paid.
This is the single most common source of "the numbers look wrong"
A shop with a lot of trade customers on terms will routinely show far fewer orders in its reports than in its order list. Both are correct. The report is counting money, the list is counting orders.
When you mark it paid, it joins the figures dated to when the order was placed, not when you marked it. A cheque that arrives three weeks late still lands in the right month.
Marking One Paid
Open the order and use Mark Paid, or set the payment status directly. Nothing is emailed to the customer, because it is a bookkeeping entry rather than news.
If you want to tell them you received it, send a note yourself.
Purchase Orders and Trade Terms
A purchase order method is usually restricted to a customer group, so it appears for trade accounts and nobody else. Set that under the gateway's Restrict to Customer Groups.
Keep an eye on the Invoice Aging Report, which groups unpaid orders by how overdue they are. If you sell on terms, that report is the one that gets you paid.
Reminders Go Out On Their Own
An order placed on terms carries a due date, worked out from the number of days set under Settings, Payment. From that date the customer is chased automatically: three days before it, on the day, and again at a week, a fortnight and a month past it.
Each stage is sent once and recorded against the order, so nobody gets the same reminder twice. An invoice settled at any point simply stops being chased.
If you would rather do your own chasing, turn Invoice Reminders off in your store settings and the schedule stops for every invoice.
Cash on Delivery and Pay in Store
Both leave the order unpaid until the money arrives, which may be days after the goods. Mark them paid at the point the cash is actually in hand rather than when the parcel goes out, or your figures will run ahead of your bank.
Custom Payment
A general purpose method for anything the others do not describe: a standing arrangement, a barter, a staff account. Rename its label to whatever you actually call it, so your order list is readable afterwards.
Risks Worth Knowing
An unpaid order has taken stock. A customer who orders twenty of something and never pays has taken twenty off your shelf until the order is cancelled. That is deliberate: a purchase order is a commitment to buy, and goods promised to one trade account should not be sold again underneath them.
Cancelling the order puts the stock back, and so does a payment that fails. The order records that it happened, so the goods cannot be returned to the shelf twice.