Selling on Account (Credit Book)

Selling on Account (Credit Book)

If your customers take goods now and pay at month end, on grant day, or on a date you agree — the classic tick book — the Credit Book replaces the spiral notebook. It lives inside Point of Sale under your Vendor role: go to Dashboard → Vendor → Credit Book. It needs the same once-off POS Access unlock as the till — one gate, one fee.

Credit Customers

A credit customer is not a platform account — just a line in your book. Only a name is required; add a phone/WhatsApp number and a photo if it helps you tell customers apart, a due-date rule (month end, grant/pension day, a fixed day of the month, next visit, or a date per sale), and optionally your own credit limit as a guardrail. Records are private to your account: only you and the staff you delegate can see them — never other sellers, never the public.

Because you store other people's names, numbers, and possibly photos, show them the printable customer notice (linked from the worklist) — it explains what you record and why. That is your POPIA disclosure to them.

Bringing Across Your Existing Book

If a customer already owes you from the paper book you were keeping, add them and then record an Opening Balance on their page — the amount they already owed, with a short note of what it was for. Do this before their first sale on account: the panel only appears while the customer has no history, because a second opening balance is not an opening balance. An opening balance adds the debt only and never touches your stock, so you never have to fake a sale to get your real balances in.

Putting a Sale on Account

At the till, build the cart as usual, then use Put on Account instead of Complete Sale: pick the customer (or add a new one in seconds with just a name), confirm the due date, done. No payment is taken and stock drops immediately, exactly like a cash sale. Taking a deposit at handover is supported — enter it and it's recorded against the same sale, so the items and the remaining debt stay on one record. You'll land on a printable credit slip (items, total, due date, customer number) to hand over or copy into the notebook by hand.

An on-account sale is not revenue until it's paid, so it doesn't appear in your Merchandise Orders list or your revenue figures — it appears in the Credit Book instead, which carries its own outstanding total.

Collecting

The worklist answers one question: who do you stop at next? Customers with a balance are grouped Overdue / Due today / Due this week & upcoming, each card showing the balance and the next due date. Open a customer to see their full history — every item taken, every payment, every adjustment — then Record Payment (cash or EFT, partial or full) and hand over the receipt, which always shows the new running balance. That running balance is what settles "I paid you and you didn't write it down" arguments, so always show it.

Getting Paid Online

If a customer would rather pay by card than find cash, send them a payment link from their page (or from the app). You can text it to them out of your SMS credits, or copy it and send it yourself on WhatsApp — most sellers do the second.

They open the link on their phone and see exactly what it is for: your business name, their customer number, what they took, and what is still owed. They can pay all of it or part of it, and it never lets them pay more than they actually owe. The moment it goes through, the payment lands in their book and their balance drops — you don't have to write anything down.

If you've connected your own Yoco keys on the Pro plan, the money settles straight into your account, never touches the platform, and no fee applies. Otherwise it reaches you in your normal payout, less any processing fee shown on the Pricing page — the panel tells you the rate before you send the link, and the fee is nil unless one has been set.

Whatever the fee, it comes off your side. It is never added to what your customer owes: their balance always drops by the full amount they paid.

A few things worth knowing: only one live link exists per customer, so there's no way for them to pay the same debt twice; if you take the cash in the meantime, the link stops being payable for that amount automatically; and you can cancel a link any time before it's paid. A link lasts 30 days. A customer with no phone number saved can still be sent one — just copy it.

This is the only part of the Credit Book where money moves through the platform. Everything else — the sale, the reminders, the cash you collect — stays between you and your customer.

Reminders

Once a day the platform sends a short, factual SMS reminder to customers whose balance is due within the next few days or already overdue. It names your business, the balance, the due date, and their customer number — nothing more. There is no threatening language, no late fee, and no escalation, because the platform records credit and never collects it.

Three things worth knowing:

• Only customers who gave you a phone number are messaged. Most tick-book customers don't have one, and that is expected — they are simply skipped, and nothing is charged for them.
• Reminders come out of your own SMS credits and are capped per debt, so a long-overdue balance can't quietly drain your wallet. If your credits won't cover the next run, the worklist shows a banner with a link to buy more — reminders never stop silently.
• A customer can reply PAID. That does not record a payment or change their balance — it just floats them to the top of your worklist marked "claims paid — confirm", so you can check and record it yourself. Only you moving money moves money.

Returns and Give-Ups

If goods come back, record a credit note with a reason — it reduces the debt. This is not a refund: no platform payment was ever involved, so the Refund Policy doesn't apply. If you give up on a debt, record a write-off with a reason — it stays visible in history forever, so you keep a record of who burned you. A customer with any history can't be deleted; that's deliberate.

Both need a reason, because "they brought the eggs back" and "I gave up on this one" are two different things and you will want to know which it was later. Both can be recorded from the phone as well as the dashboard — a tray coming back happens at the stop, not at a desk.

Neither can be more than the customer actually owes, and neither works on a customer who owes nothing — that stops a mistyped amount pushing someone's balance below zero. If you really do mean to, tick allow more than they owe on the dashboard, or choose Record anyway when the app asks.

Aging and Statements

The Aging Report breaks what you're owed into current / 30 / 60 / 90+ days overdue with a total — check it before extending more credit. Payments are applied to the oldest debt first, so the report shows what is still actually outstanding and its total always matches the balance on the customer's own page. The month-end statement run prints one statement per customer with a balance, all in one pass. Every slip, receipt, and statement is printable, and every one is also shown on screen for copying by hand.

Long after a customer has settled up and gone quiet (two years by default), the personal details on their record — phone number, photo and notes — are cleared automatically, because you no longer need to hold them. What they bought and what they paid stays in the book.

Rounds (if you deliver)

If you walk or drive the same customers on the same day each week, set up a Round from the Credit Book worklist. A round is an ordered list of stops with an optional standing order for each one — "1 tray every Friday". On the day, open the round and work down it: each stop arrives pre-filled with their usual quantities, you adjust if they want more or less, tap Hand Over & Put on Account, and move on. Stock drops exactly as it does at the till, because the goods leave the van either way.

Anyone who doesn't want anything that day gets Not today — mark visited, which records the visit and nothing else. You can reorder stops with the arrows so the round matches the way you actually travel, and a customer can be on more than one round. The round header shows what the whole round comes to if everyone takes their usual.

Rounds also make the "next route visit" due-date rule work: customers on that rule have their debt fall due on the next day the round runs, rather than at month end.

Deleting a round removes the plan only — every sale it recorded stays in the book.

Credit Limits and How They Pay

You can set a credit limit per customer. It is your own guardrail, not a rule we enforce: the till warns you before you put a sale on account that would take someone past their limit, and their page shows how much room is left, but we never block the sale. You decide who gets credit.

Each customer's page also shows how they pay — how many debts they have settled, how many were on time, how many were late, and by how long on average. These are just the facts from your own book. We don't score customers, rank them, or tell you who to trust.

On Your Phone

The book is in the app too — More → Point of Sale → Credit Book, next to the Merchandise Till. From the phone you can add a customer, put a sale on account, record a payment, record a credit note when goods come back, write off a debt, send a payment link, look at anyone's history, and walk a round.

Sending a payment link from the app works the same as on the dashboard — text it out of your SMS credits, or tap Get a link to share and send it on WhatsApp like you would anything else. The panel tells you whether they have opened it yet, and you can cancel it if they pay you in cash instead.

It works with no signal. Sales, payments, new customers and round hand-overs are saved on the phone and sent when you have signal again — the app tells you when something is waiting rather than pretending it is done. If the same action gets sent twice because the connection dropped, it is only ever recorded once, so you can never accidentally charge a customer twice or hand over the same tray twice. If something is genuinely wrong — you tried to hand over more than you have left — it tells you straight away instead of retrying quietly.

A few things need signal: adding a customer's photo (a photo is too big to hold in the queue, so add it later from their page) and sending a payment link (the link has to be created before it can be sent, so there is nothing useful to save for later). Setting a round up — creating a round, adding stops and setting standing orders — is done on the web dashboard, since it is a once-off job; the phone is for walking the round.

Signing out clears the book off the phone, because it holds your customers' names and numbers. Anything still waiting to be sent is kept, so you never lose a sale by signing out.

Staff Access

Three team permissions cover the book: View Credit Book (see it), Record Credit Payments (take money — for stall assistants), and Extend Credit & Write Off (create customers, put sales on account, run rounds, credit notes, write-offs — for whoever decides who gets credit). A common split: assistants record payments, the owner decides who gets credit.

What the Book Never Does

The book charges no interest and no fees, scores nobody's credit, and collects no debt — it only records what you extend and reminds you who owes what. The platform takes no commission on the ledger or on collections, and is not a party to the credit between you and your customer.