Deposits, pro-formas and 30-day accounts: the money mechanics of wholesale

Every boutique is a different deal

Ask a label how they get paid and you will not get one answer - you will get a roster. The established stockist on a 30-day account. The new boutique on pro-forma until trust is built. The export account paying a deposit on order and the balance before dispatch. The old friend on terms nobody has written down since 2019.

This is not a flaw to be standardised away. Trade terms are how a label prices risk and rewards loyalty - they are meant to be personal. The mistake is concluding that personal terms need manual paperwork.

The taxonomy, briefly

Wholesale terms are combinations of three questions:

• When is payment due? Before production (pro-forma), on dispatch, or on
• account - 14, 30, sometimes 60 days after invoice
• Is there a deposit? A percentage on confirmation, with the balance on a
• trigger - dispatch, or a due date
• How is VAT treated? Inclusive or ex-VAT, which changes every number on
• the document

Write those three answers down per boutique, and every invoice becomes deterministic. Which is exactly the point: the invoice should be a consequence of the order, not a fresh piece of work.

The lifecycle worth automating

The pattern that works for made-to-order wholesale is simple:

1. Confirmation raises the invoice. The totals come from the same pricing engine that priced the order, so the two can never disagree. The deposit and due date come from that boutique's stored terms. 2. Sending it is one action - emailed to the stockist with your bank details on the document, and visible in their own portal statement from that moment on. "Can you resend that invoice?" disappears as a category. 3. Payments are recorded, not reconciled. Money arrives by bank transfer the way it always has; you log it - full or partial, with a reference - and the balance, status and overdue flags take care of themselves. 4. The ledger answers the Friday question. Outstanding, overdue, and confirmed-but-not-yet-invoiced, totalled at a glance - so chasing starts with the right list.

Note what is absent: card processors. Wholesale settles by bank transfer for good reasons - the amounts are large, the relationships are long, and nobody wants 2-3% of trade prices going to a payment platform.

Personal terms, automatic paperwork

The labels that get this right end up somewhere pleasingly old-fashioned: terms as bespoke as ever, agreed over the phone and honoured for years - executed by a system that never misremembers a deposit percentage. That is the design behind invoicing and payments on Labels.io, where the money follows the order and the ledger always knows who owes what.