---
title: What is wholesale?
url: https://tideswell.xyz/docs/wholesale
description: Accounts are the doors you sell to. Wholesale orders are what they have committed to, from order through invoice to payment.
---

> Documentation index: fetch https://tideswell.xyz/llms.txt to discover every page before exploring further.

# What is wholesale?



An **account** is one wholesale customer: a store, a chain, a distributor. A **wholesale
order** is what they have committed to buy.

If <Ref to="purchasing" /> is the money going out, this is the money coming in from everybody
who is not a retail customer. It lives under **Wholesale orders** in the sidebar.

## Why does it need its own section? [#why-does-it-need-its-own-section]

Because a wholesale order behaves nothing like a Shopify order.

A Shopify order is paid, then shipped, then finished, usually within a week. A wholesale order
is agreed in February for delivery in August, confirmed in April, shipped in two parts, and
paid sixty days after that.

Fairgreen Golf Co. sells to forty pro shops. At any moment they need to know what is committed
for next season, what has actually been confirmed, what has shipped, and who owes money.

Those are four different questions with four different answers about the same order, which is
why it carries three separate statuses.

## What are the three statuses? [#what-are-the-three-statuses]

They move on their own clocks, and that is the point.

* **Order status**: Draft, Submitted, Confirmed, or Cancelled.
* **Fulfilment**: Unfulfilled, Partly shipped, or Shipped.
* **Payment**: including Part paid and Paid.

Together they let the book say "confirmed, partly shipped, unpaid since May", which is a
sentence a single status field cannot produce.

Fulfilment and payment stay locked until the order is **Confirmed**, with the reason shown
next to the control. Nothing ships or invoices against an order that is not yet agreed.

## What is a prebook? [#what-is-a-prebook]

An order placed ahead for a future season, as against an **at once** order to ship now.

That distinction is the spine of a wholesale season. Prebooks tell you what to make; at-once
orders tell you what to hold. The **ship window** and **cancel date** on each order say when
it can go and when the buyer can walk away.

The order book is sorted by ship window, nearest first, so what is about to ship is at the
top.

## What can you see about the money? [#what-can-you-see-about-the-money]

Each order carries an **aging** bucket: Not invoiced, No terms agreed, Current, 1 to 30 days,
31 to 60 days, 60 or more days, or Paid.

That is the collections list. It is the difference between knowing that somebody owes you and
knowing who has owed you for two months. See <Ref to="wholesale/overdue-and-quiet-accounts" />.

## What has to be switched on? [#what-has-to-be-switched-on]

The **Wholesale** module, in <Ref to="workspace-admin/modules" />. With it off, every wholesale
page is unreachable rather than merely hidden.

Viewing orders and accounts, and writing to each, are separate permissions.

## Read this section in order [#read-this-section-in-order]

<Ref to="wholesale/add-an-account" /> first, because an account's payment terms are what
produce an invoice due date. Then <Ref to="wholesale/write-an-order" /> and
<Ref to="wholesale/invoice-and-payment" /> are the order's life.

<Ref to="wholesale/read-the-order-book" /> is the screen you will check most often.