Net terms, late fees and surcharges

Net terms set how long a customer has to pay an invoice. Late fees are what happens automatically if they miss that window. Surcharges are a separate, related charge added at the moment a customer pays by card. If any of the three is not available in your org, your Cyntexa account executive or support can confirm what is switched on for you.

Before you start

• Late fees and overdue marking only happen if the background job that assesses them is scheduled — see the quick start guide, Part 7, InvoiceOverdueBatch. With nothing scheduled, an invoice never moves to Overdue and no late fee is ever applied, however you configure the settings below.
• You need admin access to Global Settings to change any of this.

Net terms

1. Go to Global Settings and set Net Terms (Days) for the payment object you are configuring.
2. Leave it blank, or 0, if you do not want a strict due date enforced.

An invoice's due date is its invoice date plus this number of days. Nothing else in ChargeOn reads this setting — it exists purely to set the due date the late-fee and overdue logic below works from.

Late fees

1. In the same Global Settings screen, turn on Enable Late Fees.
2. Choose Flat Fee or Percentage, and enter the amount or rate.
3. Set a Grace Period (Days) if you want a buffer after the due date before a fee applies.
4. Save.

Once due date, grace period and Enable Late Fees are all in place, an overdue invoice is charged the fee automatically the next time the background job runs — never at the moment a payment is taken.

Two things worth knowing, because they changed recently and catch people out:

• Money already on its way does not get a late fee stacked on top of it. If a payment against the invoice is still in progress with the gateway when the job runs, ChargeOn nets that amount off first and only charges a late fee on what is genuinely still uncovered. If that in-flight payment then fails, the invoice is picked up again on the next run and charged the fee in full; if it succeeds, no fee is needed at all.
• A late fee follows every unpaid invoice forward, not just the most recent one. On a recurring payment plan, when the next cycle's invoice is generated, ChargeOn carries forward the late fee from every prior invoice in that plan that is still overdue and unpaid — not only the cycle immediately before it. Each carried fee shows as its own line on the new invoice, and the source invoices it came from are cleared once it moves across, so the same fee is never shown as owing in two places at once.

A late fee always regenerates the customer's payment link for that invoice, so the link they are holding reflects the new, higher amount. You can exempt a single invoice from ever receiving a late fee on the invoice record itself.

Surcharging on card payments

A surcharge is a separate fee, added to a card payment at the moment the customer pays, to recover your processing costs. It only applies to credit cards — ChargeOn checks whether a card is credit or debit through an external lookup service before charging it, and debit cards are never surcharged.

1. Turn on Enable Surcharging globally, in Global Settings, or Enable Surcharge on an individual gateway record.
2. Set the rate and, if you want one, a minimum transaction amount below which no surcharge applies.
3. To exempt a specific customer, point ChargeOn at a field on their record that marks them exempt.

Surcharging can be switched off entirely, overridden per gateway, and exempted per customer — a gateway's own setting always takes over from the global one when both are configured. Surcharging only fires when ChargeOn's own Direct API form is what collects the card, so check each gateway's Checkout Experience in the gateway reference to see whether it qualifies.

If it does not work

Symptom	Likely cause	What to do
An invoice is past its due date but never moves to Overdue, and no late fee applies	The background job that assesses this is not scheduled	Schedule InvoiceOverdueBatch — see the quick start guide, Part 7
A partially paid invoice does not show as Overdue	This is expected — ChargeOn keeps a partially paid invoice as Partially Paid rather than relabelling it Overdue, even though it is still tracked as overdue for late-fee and collection purposes	No action needed; check the invoice's own overdue flag rather than the status label alone
A late fee did not apply even though the invoice is clearly overdue	A payment against it may already be in progress with the gateway, or the invoice is individually exempted	Check for a pending transaction, and check the invoice's own late-fee exemption
A surcharge was previewed but not actually charged	The card turned out to be debit, or the gateway's checkout experience does not support surcharging	See the gateway reference for which checkout experiences support it
Enable Surcharging cannot be turned on	Surcharging requires the credit/debit lookup service to be configured first	Ask your admin to set that up before enabling surcharge