Chipply Business - How to Invoice a Catalog Store

Deposits, fees, and invoicing all work a little differently when a store has batches underneath it. Here’s how it fits together.

If you haven't yet read How to Invoice a Store, start there first. It covers the basics (deposits, invoices, payments, organization fees) for a standard store. This article picks up from there and covers what's different about a catalog store: a parent store with one or more batches underneath it, each moving through its own timeline.

The short version: everything you already know about invoicing still applies. You're still requesting deposits, creating invoices, and collecting payment. The only real difference is that a catalog store gives you a choice of where you do those things: at the parent level, across everything at once, or at the level of one specific batch.

Deposit requests: parent or batch

The basics of requesting a deposit are in How to Request a Deposit. On a catalog store, you also choose where the request goes.

You can request a deposit against the parent. This is useful when you want to collect money up front against the whole catalog before batches even start coming in. For example, if you're issuing $2,000 in e-certificates across the whole catalog, you might request $1,000 up front at the parent level before you start purchasing items as batches close.

Or you can request a deposit against one specific batch. This is useful for catalogs that batch on a schedule (say, weekly), where you only want to collect against what's happening in that one batch, such as a negative-fundraising balance or a promo code that was used there.

Invoicing: all batches at once, or one at a time

From the catalog parent's Sales Order Summary, you can invoice every batch at once. This is the main piece of functionality that's specific to catalog stores, and it's especially useful for standalone-order catalogs where you don't want to open each batch individually just to bill it. Or, if you'd rather, you can go into a single batch's own Sales Order Summary and invoice just that batch. That's handy when you're troubleshooting one specific balance (for example, "why is this particular batch's balance due $12,000?").

Deposits flow down automaticallyAny deposit collected at the parent level becomes available to apply as its batches get invoiced. So if you collected $1,000 up front against $2,000 in e-certs at the parent, that $1,000 is there to apply as each batch comes in and gets invoiced. You don't have to manually split it between batches yourself. 

Organization fees on catalog stores

Where a fee lands depends on its type:

• One-time fees can be applied to the parent (for example, a one-time setup charge tied to launching the whole catalog) or to an individual batch (for example, an extra per-batch processing fee for something like DTF or print-on-demand).
• Per-order flat fees and per-order percentage fees are always created on the parent, but they show up on whichever batch the order actually belongs to, so a group is never charged for the same fee at both the parent and the batch level.

On the catalog parent's Sales Order Summary, fees are broken out into Parent Fees and Batch Fees, so you can see what's due at a glance. Each fee shows its creation date, and you can open (edit) a fee to see exactly which batch it's tied to.

The Accounting Summary on a catalog parent breaks fees out into Parent Fees and Batch Fees. 

Creating an invoice from the parent

When you create an invoice from the catalog parent, Chipply looks at the whole parent and proposes the closeout: one invoice for the parent, plus one invoice for each batch underneath it, oldest first. Any deposit collected at the parent cascades down that same list in order. You can review what's proposed and adjust anything you want before creating them.

1. From the catalog parent's Sales Order Summary, click Create Invoices.
2. The window lists the parent plus every batch underneath it, with a running count of how many you've selected (for example, "30 of 30 selected"). You can sort the list oldest-to-newest or newest-to-oldest.
3. Review each invoice's amount and how much of the available deposit is being applied to it. Uncheck anything you don't want to invoice yet, or adjust the applied deposit amount.
4. Just like a single-store invoice, choose whether to collect payment right away (Create Invoices & Make Payment) or just create the invoices for now (Create Invoices).

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to invoice every batch, or can I do just a few at a time?Either works. Invoicing from the parent proposes everything that's ready, but you can uncheck any batch you're not ready to invoice yet, or skip the parent entirely and invoice one batch at a time from that batch's own Sales Order Summary.

If I collect a deposit at the parent level, does it get locked to one specific batch?No. A parent-level deposit stays available at the parent and gets applied as batches are invoiced, in the same order you invoice them. It's not pre-assigned to any one batch ahead of time.

Do organization fees on a catalog store work the same as on a regular store?Mostly, with one difference: on a catalog store you also choose whether a fee applies at the parent or gets created there and rolled down to whichever batch the order belongs to. See "Organization fees on catalog stores" above.

For everything else, see How to Invoice a Store (the shared steps), Collecting Payment and Tracking What's Owed (taking a payment and finding an invoice later), and What You Can Use Invoicing For (the bigger picture).