Seller payments and remittance workflow

The last step in ensuring that sellers are paid for the products and services that shoppers have purchased is creating payments. Before payment is made for an order, the seller must ensure that:

• The order is complete
• The operator has approved the release of funds
• The remittance delay has passed.

For an overview, we suggest you read this article on financial architecture first.

Marketplacer runs an automated remittance advice generation process daily. This process checks all invoices to see if they are ready to be paid and if so, generates a remittance advice to both sellers and operators

Below are the details of the steps required and checked as part of this process. Only when an invoice successfully passes all checks is a remittance advice generated.

Has the order been dispatched by the seller?

An order is not marked complete until a seller has dispatched the order, your sellers must be trained to keep up to date with dispatching orders if they wish to be remitted. As an operator, you can also see the currently not dispatched orders via your administration hub

Have you as an operator approved the release of funds?

As an operator, one of the daily tasks required is the approval of the payment process for orders, you can complete this step by navigating to the seller payouts to approve and selecting release payment, as per below:

You can complete this step line by line, or by selecting the “release payment for all invoices” option.

In the seller configuration settings, there is an option that will allow for the automated approval of remittances. This setting can be turned on or off via the UI by navigating to a seller and editing their profile, or at seller creation. It can also be updated in bulk via the CSV upload functions.

Has the applicable remittance delay passed?

You have the option to delay remittance to sellers in your config, this can be found under Configuration > Seller Settings then changing the Remittance delay setting. 

After completing these steps, the platform runs an automated job at midnight of each day after confirming for each invoice that the three above criteria are met, it performs a series of automated checks and processes two email outputs.

• An email to the retailer, showing the invoices processed and the payment due to them. An example of this output is below:
  
• An email to the operator, showing a summary view of all the sellers and invoices processed and the payment due to each of them, broken down by invoice. In addition this email contains an error report of missed or unprocessed invoices, correcting these errors will put the invoice back into the queue for processing in the next remittance cycle. 

In addition, the email has attached a machine readable, CSV file that includes all the relevant information required to make payment to sellers including Seller Name, Bank account number, Invoice number and amount due. This file can be used to load payments directly into your accounts software.

An example of this output is below:

Remittance process

This flow diagram gives a visual representation of the remittance process.

As part of the remittance calculation process, the platform will sum all outstanding invoices and pending “recovered amount” refunds. If this number is negative, it will not process a remittance and will wait until the amount to be paid exceeds the amount to be recovered per seller.

Payment action statuses

The status under Payment Action in your invoice will vary based on the payment state. Refer to the Action column below to determine your next steps.