How do I require upfront payment from a customer?

Each time you create an invoice, you can request payment by any date that suits your schedule. This means that you can also easily require upfront payment for specific (or all!) notices and customers.

When upfront payment is required for a notice, that means the customer must submit payment before the advertising deadline for the first publication date. 

Go to My Organization > Customers and click on the customer in the table. You can click "Edit" from here and then scroll down to the customer preferences section. Select "Always require" in the dropdown button labeled "Require upfront payment?" Once this setting is turned on, upfront payment will always be required when this customer places a notice. However, you can still turn off upfront payment when creating a specific invoice.

Go to My Organization > Customers > Organizations and click on the organization in the table. Click "Edit," then scroll down to the organization preferences section. Select "Always require" in the dropdown button labeled "Require upfront payment?" Once this setting is turned on, upfront payment will always be required when this organization places a notice. 

Note: Upfront payment settings on individual customers override settings on customer organizations. If you want to require upfront payment for all members of an organization, set "Always require" on the organization. If one member of an organization doesn't require upfront payment, set "Never require" on that individual customer.

If you want to default to requiring upfront payment, you can enable upfront payment in Billing settings. If you turn on upfront payment here, settings on customers and customer organizations will override this default setting. (For example, if you turn on upfront payment in Billing, but Jane Doe is set not to require upfront payment, then Jane's invoices will not require upfront payment.)

You can select "Require upfront payment" while creating the invoice to require upfront payment on a specific notice. Click the toggle on, and payment will be requested before the advertising deadline for that particular notice. This feature makes it easy to decide whether to publish a notice when you gather the notices for publication day.

You can also click the date next to "Invoice Due Date" to select a specific due date for the invoice.

When you submit an invoice requiring upfront payment, your customer will receive an email notifying them that the invoice must be paid by the specified date.

On your home page table, you will see a warning for unpaid notices requiring an upfront payment. You can view invoice due dates by clicking on a particular notice and viewing the notice details page. The customer sees these warnings as well when they login to Column.

Customers will need time to pay their notices, but we allow you to make the judgment call!

Please note, though, that toggling on the upfront payment requirement sets the invoice due date to ad deadline for the first publication date. In the event that the date has already passed, you will not be able to toggle on the upfront payment required in Column.

Right now, we've prevented payment by check on notices that require upfront payment, as mailing a check could cause a multi-day delay—and could cause a newspaper not to run a notice that the customer thought they paid. 

If you choose to allow customers to pay by check for these notices or miss their payment deadline, then you should ensure the upfront payment requirement is not enabled.

You can send a reminder to the customer by clicking on the notice and clicking "Send Reminder."

This is up to you! Some publishers may still choose to publish the notice, and others may not. If you do not want to publish an unpaid notice, we recommend canceling the notice. If desired, you can set up your newspaper to automatically cancel unpaid notices at deadline.

If you decide to publish the notice without an upfront payment, please toggle off the upfront payment requirement at the top of the Notice Detail page. When the upfront payment requirement is toggled on, the payment link becomes inactive once the deadline has passed. To make it easier for your customers who missed the deadline, toggle off the upfront payment requirement and send them an invoice reminder to prompt them to pay. 

Please note the upfront payment deadline is tied to your ad deadlines - if your ad deadline is at 1 PM Thursday, the deadline for upfront payment would be Wednesday at 1 PM.