Invoicing employers for safety training: purchase orders, net 30 and the seat that disappears on day thirty

How does an employer book a seat on a purchase order?

The control is on the booking form because safety training declares invoicing — there is nothing to switch on and nothing to configure. An employer picks their seats, chooses to have their organisation invoiced, and fills in three things: the organisation the bill is addressed to, the accounts-payable email it should be sent to, and their own PO number if their finance team has raised one.

The address is the field that matters most, and bindro validates it rather than accepting anything with an at-sign in it. A bill sent to an unroutable inbox is a seat committed against a promise nobody will ever see, and the seat only comes back thirty days later.

The booking then completes with no card and no payment provider involved at all. That is deliberate: a training centre with no card processing set up can still take a purchase order, because the invoice branch runs before the provider checks do.

• Bill-to organisation and accounts-payable email are required; both are checked before an order exists.
• The PO number is optional — some employers pay against the invoice number alone.
• A booking cannot be part card and part invoice; mixed tender is refused.
• The bill is raised inside the same transaction that commits the seats, so a reserved seat with no bill behind it cannot exist.

What happens between the invoice and the payment?

The invoice is numbered for your training centre in an unbroken sequence — INV-000001, then INV-000002 — under a row lock, so two bookings raised at the same second cannot take the same number and your sequence has no holes in it for an auditor to ask about.

An email goes to the accounts-payable address the buyer named, not to the person who booked. It carries the invoice number, their PO reference echoed back, the booking reference, the amount and the due date, and it states plainly that the seats are already reserved, that the course can be attended before payment, and that the booking is cancelled if the bill is not paid by that date.

In the meantime the booking behaves like any other: the trainees are on the door list, the register admits them, and your seat counts are correct. What has not happened is any movement of money — an unpaid invoice writes nothing to your ledger and credits your balance with nothing.

• Terms are a fixed thirty days from the day the invoice is raised.
• The PO number is echoed on the invoice email so accounts payable can match it.
• A pending-invoice booking is admitted at the door exactly like a paid one.
• No ledger entry exists until the invoice is settled.

How do I record the money when it arrives?

Someone with the refund grant opens Invoices in the console, finds the bill and marks it paid with the bank or remittance reference the payment arrived on. The reference is required — a payment recorded against nothing traceable is how a ledger acquires money that never came — and the settlement is what writes the payment row, moves the booking to paid and credits your balance.

It is deliberately a human action. Bindro never sees the employer's bank transfer, so nothing can reconcile it automatically, and the same invoice cannot be settled twice however many times the button is pressed.

Partial payments are not modelled. An employer paying half now and half next month is a conversation to have off-platform, and the invoice stays open until the whole amount has arrived.

• Marking paid requires a remittance reference; there is no way round it.
• Settlement is idempotent — a double press cannot mint a second payment.
• Partial payments and credit notes are not supported.
• Your platform fee is taken from the settled amount like any other sale.

What happens if the invoice is never paid?

Thirty days after it was raised, a background sweep voids the invoice, cancels the booking and returns the seats to the pool. The trainees on that booking drop off the door manifest and their check-in is refused, because returning a seat to the pool while its credential still admits somebody would oversell the room.

Nothing is reversed in your ledger, because nothing was written when the bill was raised. That is the whole reason the platform is willing to commit inventory against an unpaid promise: it takes the inventory back.

What bindro does not do is chase. There are no reminder emails, no statements and no dunning schedule — one invoice email, then the void. If you are running open courses for employers, watch the Invoices page in the last week before a course runs rather than discovering the cancellation on the morning.

• The void is automatic and unannounced; nobody is emailed about it.
• Cancelled bookings release their seats, which can then be sold to someone else.
• A course that runs before day thirty still runs — the void is about the bill, not the delivery.
• If payment is genuinely coming, take the booking again rather than expecting the voided one back.

What does a block booking actually cost?

Take a two-day OSHA 10 at $189.00 a seat and an employer putting 6 people through it. The booking is $1,134.00, the platform fee is 2.5% + $0.99 per paid seat — $5.72 on a seat at this price, $34.32 across the whole block — and the rest is yours.

One invoice covers the whole block, and one roster of six places comes with it. Free courses cost nothing at all, which is worth knowing if you run funded or toolbox sessions alongside paid ones.

Card money is paid out once per course, two days after that course's last session has ended. Invoice money reaches your balance when you mark the bill paid, which may be well after the course ran.

• A seat at $189.00 carries a fee of $5.72.
• 6 seats: $1,134.00 booked, $34.32 in fees.
• There is no subscription and no monthly minimum.
• Sales tax, where you set a rate, is added on top and never counts as your revenue.