Overview
This article explains the trading terms in Emersion and how they are used to drive the invoice due date for each invoice created for a customer.
'Trading terms' refers to the rules that will determine when invoices fall due. Different businesses have different types of rules for trading terms. Often the rules vary for a customer, or group of customers based on some arbitrary criteria. For these reasons, Emersion's system makes no assumption on what these terms will be.
Each service provider is required to provide a default set of trading terms.
A service provider's default trading terms are automatically inherited by all child (customer) accounts, unless they are overridden based on the override preferences as set out below.
During onboarding, your project manager asked for your standard default set of trading terms. These were configured when your service providers account was initially created.
Calculating Invoice Due
The trading terms are used in conjunction with the invoice issue date to determine the invoice due date.
The rule is as follows
Invoice Issue Date + Trading Terms = Invoice Due Date
For example
If an invoice is approved and issued to the customer on:
- the 30th April and the trading terms is 14 days, the invoice will fall due on 14th May.
- The 11th April and the trading terms is 14 days, the invoice will fall due on 25th April.
Override Precedence
A service provider's default trading terms can be overridden for:
- A single customer account
- Customers in an account profile
The override precedence can be explained in a simple diagram below. If an override is found, the system takes this value, If the trading terms are not found at particular level, the system looks to the next place where an override might be configured.
The system default trading terms will ultimately be used if the service provider does not supply us with their own rules.
The system default setting is that invoices fall due 7 days after the issue date.
Trading Terms Options
Our system supports the following trading term options:
| Rule | Example |
|---|---|
| x days after the invoice issue date | 7 days, 14 days, 21 days. If '0' is entered, the invoice becomes due immediately after it is approved. This will trigger the Invoice Due event and send a notification to the customer (if enabled). |
| x day of the current month | Every month on the chosen date where the invoice covers the current period. If the date in the current month has already passed, the invoice will fall due on the same date in the following month If the chosen date exceeds the number of days in the current month, the last day of the current month will be used instead. Eg. If 31 is chosen and the current month is June, the invoice due date will become the 30th June. |
| x day of the following month | Every month on your chosen date where the invoice will cover the previous period. If the chosen date exceeds the number of days in the month, the last day of the month will be used instead. Eg. If 31 is chosen and the next month is June, the invoice due date will become the 30th June. |
| x days after the account invoice period end date | If the account invoice period ends on the 31st, x days after. |
Changing Trading Terms
If an invoice is already pending, any change made to the default or a customer's trading terms will not affect the pending invoice. Trading term changes will apply to invoices generated after the change is made.