Checkout without CC and Bill Customer at the End of Each Month

Question

I have 2 customer groups that i use, General and Business. I am trying to find the best solution to put through transactions and bill business customers at the end of the month.

This will allow business customers to checkout without a credit card (CC) and get the product/service they purchased. once the business customer is logged in, no CC or other payment methods should be shown except the one set. At the end of each month, i can then print/email a bill of all the purchases and send to them for payment.

I have checked for extensions for this but wasn't able to find any. Please advise me on the best way to achieve this. I am all open so any ideas will be appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

Use the Purchase Order payment method. It allows a user to check out without any payment information. Every business' accounting practices will vary, so it will be up to you to determine how you want to invoice the orders and send bills. Also, chances are pretty good that you will want some additional fields in checkout aside from "Purchase Order Number", so the mileage you get out of the default method may vary.

By default you cannot allow payment methods for only specific customer groups. There are plenty of pre-built options available that will provide this. I'm not a fan of plugging specific extensions, and one such as this is so simple that there's no need to. I'd search and find one that seems appropriate.

Answer 2

The best solution i came up with that works perfect for me, is to create a custom payment method extension from scratch or you could download one such as this: custom-payment-method

After having a custom payment method, i used this extension PaymentFilter for Products and Customer Groups that allows me to show my custom payment method only when a Business group customer is checking out.

at the end of each month, i then export all orders within that month that matches specified criterias (business customer group, business name, complete status, etc) and use this information to generate a bill, the bill is then emailed or mailed to the customer.

Works perfect!

I recommend using this method if you are looking to achieve the same thing.

I do have intentions of automating the billing aspect, by creating an extension that generates a pdf that is automatically sent to each registered business.