Playbook, online course
The receipt has a person's name and finance will not accept it
The order this happens in causes the whole problem. Somebody buys a course on their own card intending to claim it back, and only when the expense claim is submitted does anybody tell them the document has to carry the employer's name. The sale closed weeks ago, and what they are asking for is a change to who it was made to.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for billing and invoices holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The purchase is made first and expensed afterwards, so the request always arrives after the fact, from somebody who has already paid and is now being told by their own finance team that what they hold is not acceptable.
- A receipt and an invoice are the same document to the seller and two different documents to the buyer's finance team, and the difference is whether it carries a company name, a company address and a tax registration number.
- Reissuing to a different name changes who the sale was made to rather than correcting a typo, so most providers will only add details rather than transfer the purchase, and that position has to exist in writing before it is asked for.
- An employer buying several places wants a document before paying rather than after, which is the reverse of how a checkout works, so a course business without a route for that loses the buyer without ever hearing why.
How it arrives
- the receipt has my name on it not my company
- can you reissue the invoice with our tax number
- we need a purchase order before we can pay you
- my manager will only reimburse me with a proper invoice
- can you bill our finance team for six places
- what do i send to expenses to claim this back
What has to be indexed for this to work
| What your receipt already contains, listed field by field | The fields on the document a buyer gets automatically, named individually. Most expense claims are refused over one missing line, and a buyer who can see the list can tell in ten seconds whether they need anything from you at all. |
|---|---|
| Your position on adding details after a purchase | Which details can be added later, which cannot, and how long after the sale you will do it. Adding a company name and a registration number is usually possible; moving the purchase to a different buyer usually is not, and the two requests arrive in identical wording. |
| The route for a purchase order, if there is one | Whether you will raise a document before payment, what you need to do it, and the minimum number of places it applies to. If the answer is no, publish the no, because a buyer waiting on a purchase order route that does not exist simply stops replying. |
| How a buyer gets a copy of what they were sent | Where the document lives, how it is retrieved, and what to do when it was sent to an address the buyer no longer uses. Nearly every request in this pair is a retrieval problem wearing a formatting complaint. |
The reply
The document sent at purchase already carries the fields listed on our billing page, which is worth checking against what your finance team asked for before anything else [1]. Where a company name and registration number need to be added, that page sets out what we can add after a sale and the period we will do it in, and it also says plainly what we cannot change, which is who the purchase was made by [2]. If you need a document raised before payment for several places, there is a separate route on the same page. I cannot see your purchase, retrieve a copy or issue anything, so leave your name, the email you bought with and what finance has asked for, and it goes across.
It sends the buyer to check what they already have first, because a good share of these are people who never opened the attachment. Naming the one thing that cannot be changed early is kinder than discovering it after a week of messages. And the handover asks for what finance asked for, so the reply answers the requirement rather than guessing at it.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks for a document to be issued, reissued, amended or sent again, or says an employer needs paperwork before they will pay.
I cannot issue or change any billing document, and I cannot look up what was sent to you. Leave your name, the email the purchase was made with, and the exact wording finance asked for, and somebody will deal with it directly.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say a document has been issued, amended or resent, because nothing in this conversation produces one.
- Never confirm that a purchase exists, what it was for or what it cost, since no purchase is visible from here.
- Never agree to put a different company name on a sale, as that is a decision about who the contract is with.
- Never advise anybody on whether a course fee is claimable or deductible, because that depends on rules you are not answering under.
Questions
- Why is this so common on a consumer priced course?
- Because the price is low enough to put on a personal card and high enough that somebody wants it back. That combination guarantees the request, and it always arrives after the sale, which is the worst moment to discover you have no published position on it.
- Can it generate the document if we describe the format?
- No. It writes nothing and produces no files, so every request here ends as a message to whoever handles billing. What it can do is stop the message arriving at all, by showing the buyer what they already hold.
- Should we offer a purchase order route for two or three places?
- Publish whatever your answer is. A short no with the reason costs you nothing and lets the buyer put it on a card that afternoon. Silence makes them assume yes, wait a fortnight for a document, and then buy from somebody who answered.
Keep reading
- Everything for a online courseWhat is included, how long access lasts, refund and cooling off rights, and the honest limit that it cannot see a learner's own progress.
- Handling billing and invoices in generalInvoice copies, tax numbers, purchase order references. Nearly all of it is account specific, so the honest handling is process plus a clean handover.
- The second of three payments declined and the course stopped openingThree payments toward one total is not a subscription. What a decline does to access, and the retry window a learner needs the date of.
- The reset worked and the course was still not thereTwo addresses, one purchase. Why resetting the password rarely helps when a course was bought at one email and is read at another.
- Delete everything, except the thing that proves I did itErase me and keep my certificate do not sit together. What a provider holds afterwards, and why lifetime access ends with the record.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.