Recurring invoices, cards on file and late fees

Some money should arrive without anybody chasing it. A retainer, a maintenance contract, a subscription to a monthly box: the same invoice, on a schedule, paid from a card the client has left on file.

Recurring invoices

Invoices → Recurring holds the plans. A plan says who it bills, how often, from when, until when, and what to do with each invoice it raises.

The template invoice

A plan does not have its own line editor. It points at a draft invoice — an ordinary one, written with the ordinary editor — and copies its lines, terms and tax onto every invoice it raises. That is deliberate: a second line editor that only plans use is the one that rots, because it is the one nobody opens on a Tuesday.

So the shape of a plan is edited by opening its template and changing the lines. The template stays a draft for ever — it is a shape, not money owed — and every invoice raised from it takes a fresh number, today's dates and today's tax rates.

Starting one

Two doors:

• Make recurring on an invoice you have already written — the button is on the invoice, beside Void and Archive. It copies that invoice to a draft template and builds the plan around it; the invoice you were looking at is left exactly as it is. Deposits already applied and late fees already charged are not copied: they belonged to that invoice, not to every month after it. The button is not offered on a void or filed invoice, nor on a draft that is already some other plan's template.
• New plan under Invoices → Recurring, or from the client page. Pick the client and one of their draft invoices.

The schedule

• How often: weekly, every two weeks, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or every so many days. A monthly plan started on the 31st bills on the 28th in February and is back on the 31st in March — the day it is really on is carried separately, so one short month never moves the whole schedule.
• First invoice on: the date the first one falls. A plan starting today raises its first invoice within the quarter-hour.
• Payable within: days from each invoice's date to its due date.
• Stop after a date, or after a number of invoices, or neither.

What happens to each invoice

• Raise it as a draft — it waits for somebody to look at it.
• Raise it and email the client — with a link to pay it.
• Raise it, email it and charge the card on file — the money is taken on the due date, from the card named on the plan or the client's default.

Pause stops a plan without ending it. A plan resumed after its date has gone by runs at the next step from now rather than firing off every invoice it missed — catching up on four months of retainers in one night is not what anybody meant. Run now raises the next invoice early; running now and letting tonight's sweep run produce one invoice between them, not two.

Cancel stops it for good. The invoices it has already raised are untouched: they are documents, not scheduling state.

Cards on file

A saved payment method is a card or US bank account held at your payment processor and referenced here by token. The number never touches OrderDen — the client (or you) enters it on the processor's own form, and what comes back is a token plus the brand and last four digits.

You need a connected payment account first (Settings → Payments).

Two doors, and the difference matters

• The client saves their own, from their copy of an invoice: "Pay automatically next time". They read the authorisation wording and tick it themselves.
• You add one, from the client page, holding their written authorisation — which you confirm before the form appears. "They told me on the phone" is not a defence when a chargeback lands, which is why the two are recorded differently and shown differently.

Either way, what is stored beside the token is the consent: the exact words agreed to, when, from what address, and through which door. That is what a dispute argues about.

A client can have several methods; one is the default, which is what a charge uses when nothing names another. Remove takes a method off file and detaches it at the processor as well — a client who asked for their card to be removed means removed. Any plan pointed at it falls back to the default.

Charging one

An invoice with a card on file shows a Card on file panel: what is lined up, what happened last time, and a Charge now button that takes what is still owed rather than the whole invoice again.

A scheduled charge has three possible outcomes, and they are different things:

• It goes through. The payment lands like any other, receipt and all.
• The bank asks the cardholder to confirm it (3-D Secure). Not a failure: the client is emailed a link to confirm it themselves, and the invoice waits. Another automatic attempt would be refused the same way, so none is made.
• It is declined. OrderDen tries again after 1 day, then 3, then 7, and then stops rather than hammering a dead card. The client is told once, on the first decline — somebody emailed on every rung learns to ignore the email — and you are notified when the retries run out.

Everything about an attempt is on the invoice itself rather than in a queue, so an invoice that failed twice says so on its own page. Reports → Failed automatic charges is the queue of money that did not arrive, split by whether another attempt is coming.

Late fees

Off by default, and deliberately: charging one is a decision about a relationship, not a setting with an obvious answer. Turn them on in Company Settings → Sales defaults and pick:

• A percentage of the balance (so it shrinks as the client pays down) or a flat amount.
• A grace period — days past due before anything is charged. Seven is the usual answer: long enough for a cheque, short enough to mean something.
• A cap, as a percentage of the invoice, on the total the fees can ever add up to.

Three guard rails you cannot switch off, because a fee that runs away is worse than no fee at all: nothing inside the grace period, at most one fee every thirty days per invoice whatever the sweep does, and never past the cap.

And one that is a person rather than a rule: any client can be marked never charge a late fee on their own page. The long-standing customer who always pays on the 20th, the charity, the friend. A rule that cannot be excepted is a rule that gets switched off entirely.

A fee lands as a line on the invoice itself — untaxed, because a charge for lateness is not consideration for goods — and the client is emailed, so the first they hear of it is not the next statement. Check your terms say you will charge one before you turn it on.

What it is worth

Reports → Recurring revenue is the number a business with retainers is actually run on: what the running plans come to a month, per client, with what each has already billed and when the next invoice falls. Frequencies are annualised before they are compared — a weekly plan is 52 invoices a year, not 48 — so a mixed book adds up honestly.

Through the API

Plans are /api/v1/recurring-invoices (with /pause, /resume and /run); a client's methods are at /api/v1/clients/{id}/payment-methods, and POST /api/v1/invoices/{id}/charge takes what is owed off one. Saving a method is deliberately not an API operation — it needs the processor's own form in front of a person, which is the whole point. See the API reference.