Deposits, instalments and invoicing a fleet customer

How do I take a deposit, and who collects the rest?

You take the deposit; you collect the rest. That split is said first because a four-figure course is exactly the product where a payment plan changes who can buy, and a school that assumed the balance arrived on its own would find out a month later. The deposit, the number of charges and the interval are three settings on the ticket type, written from the console, and a learner choosing the plan pays the deposit at checkout.

The half that does exist is worth knowing about, because it is the half that usually goes wrong elsewhere. The schedule is enforced by the database rather than by the code that writes it: the instalments must total exactly the balance owed, a charge cannot be recorded as paid without the provider reference proving it happened, and a plan cannot be marked complete while any charge is outstanding. Plan money rests on its own liability account until the final charge clears, so a half-paid course could never appear in the balance you can be paid out.

What is NOT automatic is the collection. Off-session charging is armed separately from ordinary checkout, deliberately, because a background sweep bills people with nobody watching — and that switch is set in no environment, so bindro never takes the balance off the stored card. Treat the schedule as a published commitment you collect against. If you would rather not, the shape of the product does the same job: publish the stages of a long course as separate courses a learner books as they go, or invoice an employer on terms.

How do I bill an employer, a fleet operator or a college?

With an invoice on credit terms carrying their purchase-order reference. The booking confirms with no card at all — the invoice branch sits above the provider checks, so an organisation with no card processing configured can still take a purchase order — the places are committed, the passes go to the drivers and the bill goes to the accounts-payable address.

Nothing pretends the money arrived. An invoice is a promise: no ledger entry, no fee and no movement in your balance until you record the remittance, at which point the invoice, the order and the same balanced sale group a card checkout writes all commit together. Numbering is gapless per organisation, under a row lock, because a finance department will notice a gap.

An invoice left unpaid past its due date is voided automatically and the places go back on sale. That is the one path in the platform that returns inventory, and it is usually what a school wants in the week before a course somebody promised to pay for.

What does bindro do about sales tax?

Only what you tell it to, and only price-exclusive, which is the US convention. You put a rate on the event; the console refuses a rate that is out of range or not a number, and the tax is derived server-side in the single money calculation that both the quote and the confirmation use, so what the learner sees itemised on the checkout is what is charged.

Tax is never part of the fee base and never your revenue. It lands on a tax-payable account, and payouts settle from your balance, so collected tax cannot be paid out to you by accident. A refund reverses it in a fixed order — your proceeds first, then tax, then the platform fee — so giving money back does not leave you paying a fee on it.

What bindro does not do is decide your rate, track nexus, or file anything. There is no tax report in this vertical and no return prepared for you.

When does the money actually reach the school?

Two days after the course has been delivered. Payouts are scheduled per event once its sessions have ended, and never before — the platform will not pay a school for training that has not happened, which is the only real defence against a school closing with a term of deposits taken.

Driver training sits in the medium risk tier, so a reserve is held back for ninety days against cancellations and chargebacks and released after that. One payout is in flight at a time per organisation, and a payout reaches "paid" only when a real transfer reference comes back from the provider — the database refuses to record a payment with nothing behind it, so the console cannot tell you money moved when it did not.

Plan for it in your cash flow. Money taken in January for a course in March is not yours in January — it sits with the platform until the training has been delivered, which is the only real defence a learner has against a school that closes mid-term.

What does all of this cost?

Two and a half per cent plus ninety-nine cents on each paid place, with no monthly fee, no setup fee and nothing at all on a free course or a comp place. You choose whether the fee comes out of your proceeds or is added at checkout.

The fee is calculated over the whole basket rather than per line, and it is earned on the sale: a partial refund reverses your proceeds first and reaches the fee only once your share is exhausted, so small goodwill refunds do not cost you the fee twice.