financials

Financial High Level Overview

This is a high level overview of the required financial functionality and features on the Local Orbit site. This is based on current practices as well as the financial revision that was not completed in 2013. The overview is organized to show what tasks each type of user performs.

Additional information about money in and out of Local Orbit (cross-referenced in the Payments wiki page): https://www.evernote.com/shard/s19/sh/26c82ade-4056-477a-9452-1efc0361e1f3/503e8d876c7b3a2cce3faef4304623d1

Buyers

Paying at checkout (CC or ACH)

• Need to be able to see payment history? [EB note: this is more of an order history, currently. This is really a design decision when Victor works on the buyer dashboard. Do we separate all payment and order histories or keep them together?]
• They can already see their order history because they have access to view all past orders. For these buyers, order history is the same as payment history.

Paying via PO

• Need to receive downloadable, and printable, invoices received via email
• Payment is handled offline and direct to the market
• Access to payment history and status

Sellers

• Review upcoming payments (and the orders associated with this payment)
  • Know where the payment will come from
  • Receive an alert (email) when an automatic seller payment is made
• Review status of orders the seller has not been paid for
• Review orders seller has been paid for
• Access to payment history and status

Market Managers

Sending Invoices

• One invoice is sent per order
• Invoices are sent 24 hours after an order is delivered, providing buyers a window to report any problems before the invoices go out. Note: Invoices are sent by the market manager, whenever they decide to send the invoice
  • Currently it's reliant on sellers or MM's marking an order delivered, but there is a use case for someone printing an invoice to include with a drop off for payment at delivery. This is more of an edge case, however.
• Preview an invoice before sending
  • A MM may want to download and print to deliver an invoice to a customer, rather than, or in addition to, sending by email.
  • Save (Why is this different than actually sending?) [EB - I don't think it should be - can be changed to Send or Download/Print]
  • Institutional buyers need to save the invoices offline, and market managers may need to save offline for their records.

Entering Receipts

• Marks an invoice paid when offline payment is received from buyer
  • Enter check number or cash

Paying Sellers

Through LO

• Review and authorize upcoming seller payments (amount, date, and status)
  • MM's should actually initiate the payment to sellers.
    • this is not the case for the automated seller payments. The MM does not have to do anything & does not initiate these payments because they are paying Local Orbit to do this work for them.
  • Will require adequate funds in their account (we collect ACH/credit card payments for orders in advance).
    • There is never any money transferred between a market manager's account and a seller's

Offline Payment

• Review amount owed to each seller
• Record an offline payment to seller
  • Enter check number or cash

Viewing Activity

• View/download past seller payments
• View/download buyer payments
• View outstanding invoices
• View fees summary (type and amounts)

Admins (LO personnel)

• Review payments to sellers from LO [no approval needed - if item is delivered and no buyer reports problem in 24 hours, the payment is sent in the weekly cycle. [EB Note: we'd like this to be fully automated but haven't yet had this built. Perhaps we build this as an automated process, but enable some kind of review/override option?]
• Review payments for delivery and market fees to each Market [EB Note: we'd like this to be fully automated but haven't yet had this built. Perhaps we build this as an automated process, but enable some kind of override option?]
  • CC and ACH buyer payments received by LO
• Review (approve?/set payment date?) payments to be collected from Market
  • Monthly service fee [EB Note: these fees should be recurring on a monthly or annual basis based on sign up date ]
  • LO transaction fees for offline payment [EB Note: these fees should be automatically collected on a monthly basis; ACH withdrawal required]
  • Payment processing fees - this is built into the LO percentage. If they are on the start-up plan they are charged 2% transaction fee plus 3% credit card fee or 60 cent per seller/per transaction for ACH.
  • Combine into one invoice for single payment - this should be automatically withdrawn monthly
  • Send invoice for offline payment [EB note: this is currently a rare exception and we'd like to eliminate - but we have two Canadian markets that require this, unless we decide to take credit cards for non-US customers; It is something that might be required for vendor management in the future, or other add on services - so as a manual process, useful to have]
• View/Download activity
  • Payments to sellers
  • Payments by buyers
  • Payments to/from markets
• Summary of fees collected (type and amount)