A wholesale invoice is a request for payment from one business to another, and it has a job a Shopify order confirmation does not: it has to pass through somebody else's accounts payable process without being set aside. Most late payments from small shops are not refusals. They are invoices that could not be matched, could not be approved, or could not be found.
Take a waxed canvas dog collar: thirty dollars retail, fourteen wholesale, cases of six, so eighty-four dollars a case. A shop orders five cases in two colourways. Four hundred and twenty dollars. Everything below is about getting that four hundred and twenty into your account on the day it is due.
What has to be on it
Eleven things, and the order they appear in matters less than the fact that none are missing.
Your legal business name and address, not just your brand name. A shop paying a company called something different from the name on the invoice will stop and ask.
Your tax registration number if you have one.
The word Invoice and a unique invoice number. Sequential, never reused, never skipped.
The invoice date, which for terms purposes is the date of shipment unless you have agreed otherwise.
The due date as an actual calendar date, not the phrase net thirty. Both is better: terms net thirty, due 18 September.
The buyer's legal entity name and billing address, which is frequently not the shop's trading name or the shop's street address.
The ship-to address, separately, because the two differ more often than you expect once an account has more than one location.
Their purchase order number, if they issued one. This is the single most common reason an invoice sits unpaid at a chain.
The line items: item code, description, case pack, number of cases, units, unit price, line total.
Freight, shown as its own line, and tax if applicable.
The total, and the payment instructions — bank details, the accepted methods, and your reference.
The three fields that cause most of the delays
The purchase order number. A shop with any kind of approval process matches invoice to purchase order to delivery note. No purchase order number on the invoice means a human has to work out which order it belongs to, and that human has other things to do. Ask for the number when you take the order, not when the invoice is late.
Item codes that match theirs. If the buyer's system has your collar as WCC-BLK-M and your invoice says "Waxed collar, black, medium", the receiving note and the invoice will not reconcile. Use stable codes, use the same codes on the line sheet, the order form, the case label and the invoice, and never renumber a product that is still selling.
The unit of measure. Five cases or thirty collars. Say both, on every line: five cases, six per case, thirty units. Half the short-payment disputes in small-brand wholesale come from a shop believing they ordered five units and being invoiced for thirty.
Invoice, proforma, and the deposit version
Three documents that look similar and mean different things.
A proforma invoice is a quote formatted like an invoice, sent before the order is confirmed. It is not a request for payment and it should say so. It is useful for buyers who need a document to get internal approval before committing.
A deposit invoice asks for part of the order value before production. It should state the full order value, the deposit amount, the balance, and the date the balance falls due, and it should carry its own invoice number. The reasoning behind when to issue one is in wholesale deposit.
The final invoice then references the deposit invoice explicitly and shows the balance owed, not the full amount again. A final invoice for four hundred and twenty dollars on an order where two hundred and ten has already been paid will, quite reasonably, get paid twice or not at all.
Terms belong on the document, not just in an email
Whatever you agreed, the invoice has to carry it, because the person who pays it did not read your email.
A single block near the payment instructions does the job: the terms, the due date, the late fee if you charge one, and a line saying which currency. If the account is prepay, say prepay and state that goods ship on cleared payment. If it is net thirty, say net thirty and give the date. The background on what those terms actually cost you is in net 30 terms.
One more line worth including for direct accounts: a short note that title in the goods passes on payment. It is standard, it costs nothing, and in the rare bad situation it is the difference between a claim and a conversation.
Everything else — returns, damages, minimums, your pricing policy — lives in your terms document rather than on the invoice. Repeating them in full on every invoice makes the document harder to process, which is the opposite of what you want. Those broader policies are covered in wholesale terms.
Sending it so it gets processed
The invoice should leave with the goods and arrive in the right inbox on the same day.
For an independent shop, that inbox is usually the owner's, and a PDF attached to a short email is fine. Put the invoice number and the amount in the subject line so it is findable in a search two months later.
For anything larger, ask during onboarding where invoices go. Chains and groups frequently have a dedicated address, sometimes a portal, and an invoice sent to the buyer instead is an invoice that will be forwarded late or not at all.
Always send a PDF, never only a link. A link that requires an account will not be opened by a bookkeeper who does not have one. If you also enclose a paper copy in the carton, mark it packing slip and leave the prices off — the shop floor does not need to see the invoice and the receiving process only needs counts.
Chasing without damaging the account
Build the follow-up into the process so it is never personal.
A short note a week before the due date, stating the invoice number, the amount and the date. This is not chasing, it is confirming, and it catches every invoice that went to the wrong address.
A second note on the due date if nothing has landed, equally flat.
After that, the useful lever is not a stronger email, it is the next order. New shipments go out when the account is current, stated as a policy rather than a threat. Nearly every genuinely solvent account pays at this point, because the stock matters more to them than the float.
What to avoid: solving a late invoice by offering a discount for immediate payment. It works once and teaches the account that paying late is a way to get a better price. The exception is a stated early-settlement reduction offered to everyone from the start, which is a policy rather than a concession.
Short payments and deductions
An account occasionally pays less than the invoice. Three causes, three responses.
A damage or shortage claim, which is usually legitimate and should be settled with a credit note rather than an adjusted invoice. Never edit an issued invoice — issue a credit note against it. Editing breaks the audit trail on both sides and makes the next reconciliation worse.
A deduction the account applied by policy, common with larger retailers: a marketing allowance, a new-store allowance, a fee for not meeting a routing requirement. These should have been in the trading agreement before the first order, and if you are seeing them for the first time on a remittance, the lesson is for the next account rather than this one.
A mistake, on either side. Fix it with a credit note or a supplementary invoice, in writing, same day.
Keep every credit note numbered in its own sequence. It takes five minutes to set up and saves an afternoon at the end of the year.
Running invoices without a separate system
Most small brands do not need accounting software for wholesale on day one, and most of them outgrow a spreadsheet faster than they expect.
The practical threshold is roughly when you have more than a handful of open invoices at once, or any account on terms. At that point you need to be able to answer, in one glance, what is owed and how old it is, and a folder of PDFs cannot do that.
If your wholesale orders already run through your store, drafting the order there and invoicing from it keeps the item codes, the case packs and the stock movements in one place, which removes a whole category of transcription error. The workflow for that is described in shopify draft orders wholesale.
If you are still building the account list that will generate these invoices, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors that stock similar products, since the mix of independents and larger accounts decides how much invoicing process you actually need.
Questions brands ask about wholesale invoices
Do I invoice before or after shipping? With shipping. Invoicing before the goods leave makes the terms clock start early and gives the buyer a fair reason to dispute the date.
Should the invoice show the retail price? No. It shows what the buyer pays. Suggested retail belongs on the line sheet and the price list.
What if a shop wants one invoice per month instead of per order? A monthly statement summarising the individual invoices is the standard answer, and it keeps each order separately traceable.
Does a purchase order mean the order is confirmed? Yes for practical purposes, and it is the document you should ask for before starting production on anything large enough to hurt.