Billing departments, societies and members

How does a purchase order work without a card?

The participant or co-ordinator chooses to be invoiced at checkout and enters the billing organisation, the accounts-payable email and the PO number. The order confirms, the places are committed and credentials are issued — the invoice branch sits above the payment-provider checks, so an organisation still finishing its payout setup can take a purchase order today.

Invoices are numbered gaplessly per provider, carry the buyer's PO number and terms, and go to accounts payable while the registration confirmation goes to the participant. The door admits a pending-invoice booking normally.

When does an invoiced registration become revenue?

When you record the remittance, and not a moment earlier. Issuing an invoice writes no ledger entry whatsoever — nothing has moved — so your balance can never show money a hospital has not sent. This is structural rather than a flag somebody has to remember to filter on.

Settling in the console writes the payment row and the same balanced entries a card sale writes, and is restricted to finance and owner roles because it is the same act as accepting money. Settlement is a human asserting the remittance arrived, recorded against a reference: there is no bank feed matching it automatically. An invoice left unpaid past its due date is voided, its order cancelled and its places returned to the pool.

How do member rates avoid becoming a code that leaks?

By verifying against your roster rather than trusting a code. Load your membership list into the console, set a member rate on the ticket tier, and the membership number a participant enters is checked against that roster inside the money transaction, with the price derived on the server.

A lapsed or revoked membership is refused with a message anchored to that field, rather than quietly charged the full rate and argued about later. Only a digest of each membership number is stored, so the console can show who is current without ever showing a membership number back — a reference that unlocks a lower price is a bearer secret and is treated as one.

How does a department book places before it knows who is going?

It books the quantity it wants and names people later. Each place paid for becomes a roster slot; the co-ordinator either types the names in or emails each place to the person taking it, who fills in their own details — including their own disclosure and licence answers, which is the point of doing it that way.

Filling a place rewrites the row the money already created, so a twelve-place order can never become thirteen people. A place nobody has named is kept off the door list and refused if scanned. Where you publish a group rate with a minimum quantity, an order at or above that threshold takes the group price automatically and the line records why it was cheaper.

What does a real registration cost, end to end?

Take a two-day regional conference at $595.00 for the non-member rate. The platform fee is 2.5% + $0.99 per paid registration, so $15.87 on that place. A department booking 8 places pays $4,760.00 and the fee across the order is $126.96.

You choose whether the provider absorbs that fee or the participant pays it at checkout; either way both halves are shown and always sum to the same whole. Free activities cost nothing, so a grand-rounds series you do not charge for carries no fee at all.

When does the money actually reach the provider?

Two days after the activity completes. A payout exists only for an activity whose sessions have ended — the platform will not advance money against a conference that has not happened, and this is structural rather than a setting somebody can turn off for a good customer.

CME providers sit in the medium risk tier, so a reserve percentage is held back and released later against refunds and chargebacks. Plan the venue deposit accordingly: registrations that close six months early do not become cash six months early.