Billing law firms for CLE seats on a purchase order

Why can a firm not just pay by card?

Many can, and do. But a firm booking a block of seats through its accounts department frequently cannot: the spend needs a purchase order, the PO number has to appear on the bill, and the payment runs on a monthly cycle rather than at the moment of registration. Insisting on a card at checkout means losing the booking or taking it on a spreadsheet outside the system.

On bindro the invoice path is a first-class checkout option for CLE providers. The registration confirms without a card, the seats are committed in the same pool as every other registration, and the attorneys appear on the door list straight away — the bill being unpaid does not make them second-class registrants.

What does the firm see, and what does accounts payable get?

The person booking chooses to invoice their organisation and gives the billing name, the accounts-payable address and their PO number. Those fields are validated on the money path — a blank or malformed billing address is refused against the field, with no half-made order behind it.

The bill itself is numbered from your own gapless sequence, so your first invoice is your first invoice and there are no missing numbers for an auditor to ask about. It is sent to the accounts-payable address quoting their PO, while the registration confirmations go to the person who booked.

The total on the bill is derived by the server from the seats and rates you published. It is not a figure the booker typed.

What happens in my accounts before the firm pays?

Nothing, deliberately. Issuing an invoice writes no ledger entry at all — an invoice is a promise, not money — so your balance does not carry a registration nobody has paid for and no payout can be funded from an outstanding bill.

When the remittance arrives, someone with finance rights records the settlement against a reference. That is the moment the sale is written and the money is credited, and it is deliberately a human act attributed to a named person: bindro has no bank feed and will not pretend to have matched a payment it cannot see.

Recording the same settlement twice is refused, so a duplicated remittance reference cannot pay you twice for one bill.

What if the firm never pays?

An invoice past its due date is voided automatically. The registration is cancelled, the seats go back on sale, and — because no ledger entry was ever written — there is nothing to unwind financially.

The door follows the same fact. A voided registration drops off the manifest, and a stale scan for it taken on a device that synced before the void is reported as rejected rather than quietly dropped, so nobody is admitted on a booking that no longer exists.

Practically: set your terms to match your own chasing cycle, and treat the void as the backstop rather than the collections process.

How does this fit with a firm naming its attorneys late?

It fits exactly. A firm can buy the places first and name the attorneys afterwards — the roster is filled in by whoever booked, or each place is emailed to the attorney taking it so they fill in their own details.

The places are seats the order already paid for; filling one renames it rather than creating anything, so a firm cannot end up with a ninth attorney on an eight-place booking. A place nobody has named is kept off the door list and refused if scanned, which stops an unnamed seat becoming a credit attributed to nobody.

• Take the block booking on a purchase order in one transaction.
• Send the roster link to whoever at the firm knows who is coming.
• Chase unnamed places before the day, not at the door.
• Record the settlement when the remittance lands — that is when it is your money.