Receivable
A Receivable is an inbound payment you request from a customer Company.
A Receivable is a payment you request from one of your customer Companies. With Routable, you can send a Receivable
to your customer immediately or schedule it to be sent on a future date. You can specify the bank account to accept the payment, and your customer will be routed to a secure external flow hosted by Routable where they can complete an ACH payment to you. You can even mark a Receivable
as having been paid externally, and use Routable as the bridge between your application and your accounting software.
When a Receivable
is processed, funds are withdrawn from a PaymentMethod that the customer creates in the external flow, and transferred via ACH to the bank
Account referenced in the deposit_into_account
field of the Receivable
.
If you have turned on Approval Rules for your account, Routable will automatically identify the appropriate TeamMembers to request approvals from depending on the Receivable
amount, and notify them of a request for approval. All you need to do is set up your approval rules, and the API takes it from there. Receivables
will be created in a needs_approval
state if they are being held pending one or more approvals.
A note on status codes
Please note that it is possible for
POST
requests to return a202 Accepted
response that indicates that we are still processing the request. To ensure that theReceivable
has been successfully created, you may attempt to retrieve it using the returned ID orself
link.
Types of Receivables
Routable supports creating two types of Receivables
:
Invoice (type=invoice
) - Default
- Create this Receivable
when you want your customer to pay you via Routable.
- Your customer will receive an email inviting them to visit Routable's hosted, branded external flow to make payment. Payments will be delivered via ach_standard
.
External (type=external
)
- Create this Receivable
when you want to track a payment that was received outside of Routable.
Receivable Lifecycle
Receivables
have a lifecycle consisting of several statuses that change as the payment is created, processed and ultimately delivered. You can listen for webhook events to be notified when a Receivable
is created or changes state. This is a good idea when you are maintaining a copy of Receivable
data in your application, for example, in a data warehouse.
Best Practice: Use Idempotency Keys
Routable supports the use of Idempotency Keys to help protect against inadvertent repeated transactions. We strongly recommend using this optional feature when automating
Receivables
.
Adding Attachments to Receivables
You may want to track File Attachments alongside your Receivables
, for example, a CSV of the inventory received on a purchase order or a PDF of an invoice. You can attach one or more files, and they will be attached to the invoice in both Routable and your integrated accounting software.
Scheduling Receivables
Routable supports 3 different ways of scheduling your Receivables
based on the value supplied for send_on
:
Sending a Receivable Today
- To send a Receivable
today, set it to today's date in Pacific time.
- Use this when you want to send a Receivable
request ASAP.
- The Payable
will immediately transition into the pending
status.
- This is the default.
Sending a Receivable on a Defined Date in the Future
- To create a scheduled
Receivable
on a defined date in the future, set send_on
to a future date in Pacific time.
- Use this when you want to send a Receivable
request in the future.
Sending a Receivable with no defined date
- To create a Receivable
in a ready_to_send
status, explicitly set send_on
to a value of null
.
- Use this when you want to prepare a Receivable
to be sent but not send it yet. This can be useful when testing out your integration. This strategy is also helpful when you intend to add additional line items over time to "snowball" a Receivable
with many small amounts, for example with microtransactions, and then allow your customer to pay for them with a single transfer of funds.
Customer Notification
When sending Receivables
via our API, we will notify all contacts associated with the company based on the values specified for their default_contact_for_payable_and_receivable
field.
The message
field may contain an additional message you wish to include with emails to your vendors. Its value may include a limited subset of HTML tags:
b | blockquote | br | h1 - h6 | header | hr |
li | ol | p | pre | q | small |
span | strong | sub | sup | table | tbody |
td | tfoot | th | thead | tr | u |
ul | var | wbr |
Accounting Software Integration
If you have an accounting application such as QuickBooks Online or Oracle NetSuite integrated with your Routable account, you will need to provide some extra data when creating a Receivable
. The ledger
object is reserved for this purpose. Each application requires different fields on the Receivable
, and in some cases, the Receivable's
line items as well.
Visit the API Reference for a full listing of fields required for your accounting application. If you need to import configured and customized fields in Accounting Software from your accounting application, you'll need to contact the Routable Developer Experience team to assist.
Updated about 1 year ago