How to bill a company one invoice for its employees' purchases on Shopify

What native Shopify B2B gets you

On Shopify Plus you can create a company, give it locations, assign payment terms, attach customers as company contacts, and let them check out on account. That is a real foundation. A contractor’s purchasing manager can buy on net 30 today without any custom work.

The corporate account program most retailers actually sell is a different shape. The buyers are employees, not a purchasing manager. There are many of them. Each has a cap and a list of what they can buy. Some orders need sign-off. And the company wants one invoice a month with a PO number on it, not forty.

The four things that are not native

Per-employee caps. Native B2B has no idea that this person has $60 of a $200 quarterly allowance left. A cart validation Function in checkout does, and it runs at web checkout and at Shopify POS.

Allowed products. Same mechanism. Safety products only, or the uniform collection only, or everything except clearance.

Approvals. An order over a threshold is created as a draft order, the client’s approver gets a link, and approval turns it into an order. Rejection tells the employee why.

The consolidated invoice. One document per company per period, generated from orders tagged with the company and the period. Per-order lines or per-employee lines. PO reference. Totals that tie exactly to Shopify.

Each of those is described on our corporate accounts and invoicing page, which is the custom build for Shopify Plus merchants over $2M a year.

Or fund it as store credit instead

Some clients would rather pay up front. The company buys a pool of store credit, each employee gets a balance, and spending is limited by the balance instead of by a cap. The invoice happens at the start instead of the end, or on redemption if that is the deal. The roster, rules and reporting are the same layer. See how to run an employer-funded store credit program on Shopify for that version.

Start with one client, by hand

If you have one corporate client, do it natively: company, terms, employees as contacts, export orders at month end, build the invoice in your accounting system. You will learn exactly which of the four gaps above hurts most, and that is the brief for the build when the second and third client arrive.