Getting paid by institutions: purchase orders, invoices and net terms

If your consumer side runs on cards at checkout, selling the same product to a school, district, university or public body works almost nothing like it. Institutional buyers generally do not pay by consumer card. They transact through purchase orders, invoices, bank transfer or ACH and net payment terms. It is a different payment rail and a markedly slower one, and it sits alongside your B2C flow rather than replacing it.

This guide looks at how institutional billing actually works, where the money gets stuck, and how to reconcile receipts that arrive by bank transfer, often in round amounts and detached from any order. It is general information, not financial or tax advice, so confirm your own position before acting on it.

A different rail from consumer checkout

On your consumer side, a learner clicks buy, a card is charged, and the money is on its way in moments with the order attached. Institutions do not work that way. A buyer raises a purchase order that authorises the spend, you supply against that PO and issue an invoice, and the institution then pays that invoice by bank transfer or ACH after the agreed net terms have elapsed. There is no instant card capture and no order reference riding along with the cash.

Before any of that, you usually have to be set up as an approved vendor or supplier in the institution's system, which is its own piece of paperwork. None of this is unusual for institutional buyers, but it is operationally separate from your consumer checkout, and treating the two the same way is where things go wrong.

Where the money stalls

The most common reason institutional payments are late is not reluctance, it is a mismatch. If the invoice does not match the purchase order, or the payment does not match the invoice, the whole thing stalls in someone's accounts-payable queue until the discrepancy is resolved. A wrong PO number, a quantity that does not line up, or a line item that was not pre-authorised can hold up payment for weeks.

Net terms then add a deliberate, agreed delay on top. Even a clean, matched invoice is not due until the terms run, so you are financing the gap between delivery and payment. The discipline that keeps institutional cash moving is making sure the PO, the invoice and the eventual payment all line up exactly, so there is nothing for the buyer's finance team to query.

Reconciling receipts that arrive detached from the order

When the money finally lands, it often does not look like your consumer transactions at all. An institutional payment typically arrives as a bank transfer, sometimes in a round amount, sometimes covering several invoices at once, and frequently with little more than a reference you have to decode. Matching that receipt back to the right PO and invoice is real work, and it is completely different from reconciling card settlements.

So you end up running two reconciliation flows in parallel: the high-volume card flow from consumers, and the lower-volume but higher-value institutional flow of PO-based invoices settled by transfer. Keeping those clearly separated, and matching each institutional receipt to its PO and invoice, is what stops the institutional side from becoming a black box. Where institutions are abroad, the receipt may also arrive in another currency, which adds a conversion step to the match.

How Altery fits

Altery gives you a business account that can receive institutional payments by bank transfer or ACH, so the slower PO-and-invoice rail has somewhere clean to land alongside your consumer card flow. Real-time balances let you see exactly when an institutional transfer has actually arrived rather than guessing from your invoicing system.

Because the accounts are multi-currency and hold USD, EUR and GBP, you can receive payments from cross-border institutions in their own currency and run FX on your own timeline instead of converting the moment money lands. Ring-fencing money into pots or sub-accounts helps you keep institutional receipts separate from your B2C takings, and categorised, real-time records make it easier to reconcile each PO-based payment back to its invoice. Multi-entity management helps if you bill institutions through a different company from your consumer business. Altery is not a bank, and this is general information rather than advice.

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