Getting paid online

Let your clients pay an invoice by card or US bank account straight from its share link — no account, no phone call, no waiting for a cheque. The money lands in your own bank account, and OrderDen never touches it.

How it works

OrderDen uses Stripe to take payments. You connect (or create) your own Stripe account once; from then on:

1. You send a client an invoice share link as usual.
2. The link shows a Pay $X button under the invoice.
3. They pay by card or US bank account, on a form hosted by Stripe.
4. The payment appears on the invoice within seconds — with the fee Stripe charged and the amount that will reach your bank — and the invoice moves itself to Partially paid or Paid.
5. Your client gets a receipt by email; you can see the whole trail on the invoice's History tab.

The Stripe account is yours: Stripe holds the money, runs the compliance checks, handles disputes and pays out to your bank on its normal schedule. OrderDen adds nothing on top of Stripe's fee — what you pay is what Stripe charges you.

Connecting your account

Company Settings → Payments, then Connect Stripe (owners and admins only). You'll be taken to Stripe to create an account or sign in to one you already have, and to give them the details they need — your business, a bank account to be paid into, and identity verification. It takes a few minutes; you can leave and come back, and Continue on Stripe picks up where you left off.

Back in OrderDen the page shows three things:

• Onboarding complete — Stripe has everything it asked for.
• Payments enabled — Stripe will accept charges. This is what the Pay button depends on.
• Payouts enabled — Stripe will pay the money out to your bank.

Stripe sometimes enables payments before payouts (or asks for one more document later). The page keeps itself current, and Refresh status checks again on demand. Stripe dashboard opens your own Stripe account, where payouts, disputes and fee statements live.

Choosing what clients can pay with

Also on Company Settings → Payments:

• Card — credit and debit cards, plus Apple Pay and Google Pay where the client's browser offers them. Cleared immediately.
• US bank account (ACH debit) — much cheaper on large invoices, but takes a few business days to settle. The payment shows on the invoice once it clears, not when it is started.
• Allow part payments — lets a client pay less than the full balance (a deposit, or whatever they can settle now). Turn it off to make it the whole balance or nothing.

Turning both methods off simply removes the Pay button; the link still shows your written payment instructions from Company Settings → Documents.

Fees, and what they do to your numbers

Stripe's fee comes out of every online payment. OrderDen records it, so a $100 card payment shows as $100 paid, with the fee and the net beneath it. Your client still owes nothing — the fee is your cost, not their debt.

Because it is a cost of the sale, it is counted as one:

• The Margin card on an order adds a payment fees line to the cost basis, alongside line costs and freight.
• The revenue reports (by client, by item, by period) carry two extra columns: Payment fees and Net after fees.

Manual payments — cash, cheque, a bank transfer you were told about — carry no fee, so they don't move those figures at all.

Refunds

On the invoice page, an owner or admin can Refund any payment, in full or in part, with a reason.

• On a payment made online, the money goes back to the client's card or bank account through Stripe. Stripe's fee is not returned.
• On a payment you recorded by hand, the refund is just a record: nothing is transferred from OrderDen, because nothing came through it.

A refund never deletes the payment — it is netted out of what has been paid, so the history stays honest. That means a Paid invoice reopens as Partially paid (or back to Sent if everything is refunded), and the balance due goes back up. Refunds you issue from the Stripe dashboard are picked up automatically and appear the same way.

A payment typed in by mistake can still be removed outright — but only a manual one. Money that actually moved has to be refunded.

Cards on file

Once your account is connected, a client can leave a card or US bank account on file — from their copy of an invoice ("Pay automatically next time"), or added by you on their client page with their written authorisation. The number never touches OrderDen: it is entered on Stripe's own form and comes back as a token.

An invoice with a card on file gains a Charge now button, and a recurring plan set to charge takes the money on the due date by itself, with a 1/3/7-day retry ladder behind it. See Recurring invoices, cards on file and late fees.

Recording payments by hand

Nothing about online payments changes the manual flow. Record a payment on any invoice takes an amount, a method (cash, check, bank transfer, card, bank debit, marketplace or other), an optional note for the detail ("cheque no. 118"), a reference, a date and notes. Invoices track both kinds side by side, and the balance due is derived from all of them.

If you don't see the Payments tab

Online payments have to be switched on by whoever runs your OrderDen server. On a self-hosted install with no payment processor configured, Company Settings → Payments says so, and everything else — recording payments, share links, your written payment instructions — works exactly as before.

Troubleshooting

• The Pay button isn't on my share link. Check Company Settings → Payments shows Payments enabled, that at least one method is switched on, and that the invoice still has a balance and isn't void.
• A client paid but the invoice hasn't moved. Card payments appear within seconds; bank debits take a few business days to clear and appear only when they do. If a card payment still hasn't landed, look for it in your Stripe dashboard and get in touch.
• My client wants to pay in instalments. Turn on Allow part payments and they can pay the invoice down over several visits to the same link.