Every dispensary operator has been here. A $4,000 wholesale invoice is due, the vendor's waiting, and this week's deposits don't quite cover it. You want to pay what you can now and keep the relationship healthy — but "pay the whole thing or pay nothing" was your only real option. So you'd send an email, promise the rest Friday, and hope everyone remembers the arrangement.
Partial payments turn that side conversation into a real, tracked action. From your Payments page, you pay part of an invoice, the invoice stays open for the remainder, and the vendor gets a clean notice of exactly what was paid and what's left. No spreadsheet on the side. No "wait, how much did we still owe them?"
What a partial payment actually does
Say that $4,000 invoice, and today you can send $2,766. You pay the partial, and the platform splits the invoice into what moved and what's still due:
A check for $2,766 goes out to the vendor. The invoice moves to Partially Paid — a status that deliberately still counts as due — and the remaining $1,234 keeps surfacing in Payments Due until you finish it off. The invoice is never marked settled until the balance hits zero.
How you send one
Open the order from the Wholesale Payments or Non-Cannabis Payments tab of your Payments page and start a payment the way you always do. In the amount step, you'll see two choices — pay in full, or pay a partial amount:
A stylized recreation of the pay dialog. The platform confirms the split before anything sends.
Pick Pay a partial amount, type the figure, and the dialog shows the remaining balance in real time before you commit. The confirmation restates the whole thing in plain language — how much goes out and how much stays due on the invoice. Approve it, and the check is generated like any other payment. You can pay against the same invoice as many times as you need; the balance updates every time.
What the vendor sees
This is the part that keeps the relationship clean. A partial payment isn't a silent under-payment the vendor has to catch — the platform emails them the moment it goes out, with a facts table that answers the only question that matters: where does this invoice stand now?
A check for this payment has been issued — download it from your portal.
| Invoice total | $4,000.00 |
| This payment | $2,766.00 |
| Previously paid | $0.00 |
| Remaining balance | $1,234.00 |
The vendor downloads the check from their portal like any payment, and sees the invoice marked Partially Paid with the balance on their side too. The language stays honest — a check has been issued, not "you've been paid," because a payment isn't confirmed until it clears. Both sides are looking at the same number, so nobody has to reconcile a handshake.
The vendor never has to ask "how much do we still have outstanding?" The email already answered it, and the invoice on their portal says the same thing.
The guardrails
Partial payments are scoped so a balance can't be overpaid, double-paid, or lost track of. A few rules are worth knowing before you use it:
- Check rail only. Partials go out as Check 21 digital checks or mailed checks. ACH bank transfers aren't available for a partial — pay in full to use ACH.
- Each partial is its own check. Every partial payment is a separate check and carries your standard $20 per-check fee. Three checks against one invoice means three $20 fees — no subscription, no percentage of the payment.
- $1 minimum, and leave at least $1. A partial must be at least $1.00 and must leave at least $1.00 still due. If your amount lands within a dollar of the balance, the dialog steers you to just pay in full.
- Credits apply at the close. You can't attach a credit memo to a partial. Apply credits when you settle the remaining balance. Order-level credits already applied still reduce what's owed.
- Wholesale and non-cannabis only. Partials work on regular PO-backed invoice payments across both tabs. Consignment settlements are excluded — those run on their own settlement schedule.
Closing it out — and your books
When you're ready to finish, pay the exact remaining balance. That closing payment runs the normal full-payment path: the invoice flips to Paid, the delivery completes, and any credit memos you've been holding can be applied. Until then, it stays in Payments Due so it can't quietly fall off.
Your accountant sees the whole thing cleanly. Each partial check syncs to QuickBooks as its own bill payment, sized to that check and pre-matched in your bank feed. An invoice paid in three checks shows up as three bill payments — the running balance in QuickBooks always matches what ShelfSpace shows. No manual journal entries, no reconciling a partial by hand.
Why this matters for cannabis retailers
Cannabis is a cash-timing business. Deposits land when they land, big invoices cluster, and the vendors you rely on most are the ones you can least afford to leave in the dark. Paying in full or not at all forced a bad choice: overextend, or stiff a partner and smooth it over later with an email nobody logged.
Partial payments give you the middle ground your cash flow actually lives in — pay what you can, keep the invoice honest, keep the vendor informed. It's the same principle behind everything else on the platform: the payment a vendor receives should answer its own questions, and every dollar should tie back to an invoice, a check, and your books.
Want to see the full workflow, field by field? The partial invoice payments documentation walks through every step, limit, and status. Or if your AP still runs on hand-cut checks and side agreements, talk to us — the free evaluation shows what your cannabis AP on the platform would look like, partials and all.
