OFFICE: Late Payment Penalties

What are Late Payment Penalties?

Late Payment Penalties let you write your late-payment terms down once and have SuiteDash apply them evenly and automatically. When an Invoice passes its Due Date, SuiteDash builds the late fee you defined, explains it clearly to your Client, collects it together with the Invoice, and shows it on the receipt and in your accounting record.

The feature is off until you set it up, so nothing about your Invoices changes until you turn it on. Writing the rules happens in your Invoice Settings. Exempting a Client or an Invoice, and waiving a fee, need permission to edit Invoices, and none of it is ever visible to your Clients.

How do I set up my late-payment rules?

Open your Invoice Settings and find the Late Payment Penalties section. It starts switched off.

Turn on Charge late fees on overdue Invoices and the rest of the section appears: your rules, the ceiling, the worked example, and a note on what late fees do not cover.

You build your policy as a set of rules, and each rule covers a stretch of lateness. A rule row reads as a sentence: From day [N] charge [a fixed amount, a percentage, or whichever is greater] applied [once, every day, every week, or every month].

• When it starts: The day the first rule begins is your grace period. There is no separate grace-period setting, you simply say which day charging starts. SuiteDash suggests 5 to 10 days, to cover bank and postal delay.
• What it charges: A fixed amount, a percentage of what is still owed, or whichever is greater. A fixed amount is always in the Invoice's own currency, with no conversion, so a rule set to 25 charges 25 of whatever currency the Invoice carries.
• How often: Once, or repeating every day, every week, or every month for as long as the Invoice stays in that rule's stretch of lateness. Timing is worth knowing: a once rule charges on its start day, while a repeating rule charges at the end of each completed period. A rule set to every month from day 10 therefore makes its first charge about a month after day 10, not on day 10 itself.
• A mandatory ceiling: Every Portal must set a maximum total late fee per Invoice, as a fixed amount or as a percentage of the Invoice total. This cannot be left blank. It is the one guard that stops a fee running away.

Rules are applied in order by how late the Invoice is, and each rule charges from its own start day until the next one begins. Two rules cannot share a start day, because one of them would then cover no days at all.

As you write, SuiteDash keeps two panels up to date beneath the rows. Your rules, in plain words restates your policy as sentences. What your rules would do is a worked example on a sample Invoice, so nobody has to do the arithmetic in their head. If a rate works out aggressively, a note appears beside the field pointing out that published late-fee terms are usually 1 to 2 percent a month. It is a warning only, and it never stops you saving.

TIP: A percentage is always calculated on the outstanding principal of the original Invoice, never on late fees already added, so a fee never compounds on another fee.

When do my rules start applying?

There is no date to pick. The moment you save, your rules are in force, and every Invoice issued from then on is permanently tied to the version of the policy that was in force on the day it was issued.

That has two consequences worth knowing:

• Turning the feature on never reaches backward. An Invoice that already existed when you wrote your rules is tied to nothing, so it can never accrue a late fee, even if its Due Date has not arrived yet.
• Editing your rules later never changes an Invoice that is already accruing. It keeps charging under the rules it was issued under. New rules apply to new Invoices.

An Invoice can also never start life already overdue. A Due Date that has passed is refused when you type one, and on the paths that copy a date from somewhere else, such as duplicating an Invoice or converting an Estimate or Work Request, the Due Date is moved forward to today instead. A late fee therefore only ever comes from time that genuinely elapsed.

How does a late fee build up on a past-due Invoice?

Once an Invoice passes its Due Date, SuiteDash grows the fee according to your rules, on its own. Lateness is counted in whole days from the Due Date, in your account's own timezone, so your Staff, your Client, and the scheduler all reach the same day count.

The amount due shows the late fee flagged in red, in your Client's view, in the Staff view, and on the PDF, so everyone can see that part of the total is a late fee and what it was calculated from. The line is labelled Late Fee and carries a short explanation naming the day it started applying and the amount it was calculated on.

A repeating rule is always shown as one figure covering the whole stretch, with the day it began, never as a long list of separate entries. When the fee reaches your ceiling, the Invoice says so plainly rather than quietly stopping.

While a fee is only accruing, nothing is written to the Invoice itself. The fee is calculated for display only, so a copy your Client already downloaded does not become stale and your Invoice edit screen never shows a line SuiteDash is managing. The fee is written onto the Invoice at the moment a payment begins, not before.

IMPORTANT: A PDF you link to is the exception. The stored file is regenerated in place, so the document behind a link reflects the fee as it stands today. The promise is that a copy your Client already downloaded stays as it was, not that a link never changes.

Which Invoices never accrue a late fee?

• Recurring and Subscription Invoices. These never accrue, whether the Invoice is itself recurring or simply carries a recurring item.
• Invoices with no Due Date. There is nothing to measure lateness from.
• Invoices that are not genuinely open and unpaid. Cancelled, Draft, processing, and errored Invoices never accrue. Only Open and Partially Paid Invoices do.
• Anything covered by an exemption, at the Client level or the Invoice level.

IMPORTANT: An Invoice on an Installment Payment plan is not excluded. The plan protects a Client who keeps to it, and nothing accrues while the instalments are met. Once the Invoice's own Due Date passes, the plan stops shielding it: the fee lands once on the whole amount still owed, exactly as it would on any other Invoice, and from that moment the balance is settled in one payment rather than an instalment at a time.

How does a Client pay a past-due Invoice?

From the Portal or an emailed payment link, your Client settles a past-due Invoice in one payment for the full balance. The amount is fixed and cannot be edited or split, with a short line in red explaining why. The figure is locked in the moment payment begins, before the payment provider is contacted, so a day boundary crossed during checkout never changes what your Client is charged.

Where a payment method earns a discount in your Portal, the fixed amount is the one that applies to the method your Client chose, so the full balance is one figure per payment method rather than one figure per Invoice.

The late fee is added to the Invoice as an ordinary line in the same step as the payment, so it is taxed and discounted exactly like any other line, and the receipt shows the late fee among the Invoice's lines with a total that matches what your Client paid. If a payment is cancelled or abandoned, the fee line is removed and the Invoice is left exactly as it was. A Client who comes back later starts a fresh attempt and sees a figure that reflects the time that passed.

What happens when Staff record a payment?

When a Staff member or bookkeeper records a cheque or bank transfer against a past-due Invoice, the same rule applies: it is settled in one full payment, with no Staff exception. The refusal is measured against what is actually left on the Invoice, so an Invoice part-paid before it went late can still be settled for its remaining balance.

If you need to accept part of the money instead, the sanctioned way is to exempt that Invoice first, which drops the fee and lets the Invoice take a part-payment again.

What happens if I edit an Invoice carrying a late fee?

Editing an Invoice your Client has already been sent changes what they owe, so SuiteDash shows you a Before You Edit This Invoice screen first and changes nothing until you continue. Among the consequences it lists, the one that matters here is that the late fee currently showing comes off, and starts again from the new Due Date. An edited Invoice also needs a Due Date that has not already passed.

How do I exempt a Client or an Invoice?

There are two exemption switches, and they answer different questions. Both live under Late Fee Exemption: on a Contact's row actions for the Client-level switch, and on an Invoice's row actions for the Invoice-level one.

• Never Charge This Client Late Fees: This relationship is never charged a late fee, on anything that Client is invoiced, including Invoices you send from now on.
• Never Charge Late Fees on This Invoice: This one Invoice is not charged, for example when a delay was not the Client's fault. It is also the sanctioned way to accept a partial payment on an Invoice that was carrying a fee.

The Invoice-level switch appears only on Open and Partially Paid Invoices, because on anything else it would be a control with nothing to control.

IMPORTANT: An exemption stops future fees but never reverses a fee that was already collected.

How do I remove or give back a late fee?

It depends on whether the fee has been collected yet.

• Not yet collected: Remove it by deleting its line on the Invoice, which recalculates the Invoice. There is no separate step for this case.
• Already collected: Use Waive Collected Late Fee on the Invoice's row actions. The fee line comes off and the Invoice returns to what the Client actually owed, while the money they paid stands, so the Invoice is left overpaid by the fee. The waiver is filed against the Invoice with its amount and who made the decision, so money you owe back is easy to see later, and the receipt your Client already holds stays correct because it describes what happened at the time.

Waiving is Staff-only and appears only on a Paid Invoice that actually carries a collected fee. No gateway refund is issued, because giving the money back happens the same way your business already gives money back, whether that is outside the platform or set against their next Invoice.

Where do late fees appear in my accounting and Reports?

A collected late fee crosses to your connected external accounting system as a clearly labelled Invoice line, so a bookkeeper can see exactly what the larger amount is for.

The Settings section carries a What This Does Not Cover note, and it is worth reading before you switch on. A late fee joins the Invoice total only at the moment a payment is made, so a fee that an unpaid Invoice has accrued is shown on the Invoice itself but is counted nowhere else:

• It is not in the Accounts Receivable Aging report. An Invoice is aged there at what it asked for, not at what it would ask for today.
• It does not reach a connected accounting integration at all until it is collected.

In this first version, collected late fees are also not reported separately from principal in SuiteDash's own revenue and payments Reports.

CLICK HERE to learn more about your Invoice Settings.