Payment & commission

The money mechanics of one deal: ACH or check, the 10-day hold, and the commission paywall.

For: Buyers · sellers · billing admins

Two different payments happen in every deal, and they run on different rails: the buyer pays the seller for the vehicle, and the seller pays Cypress its commission. Keeping the two straight explains almost everything about the closing's money steps.

The buyer's payment — Confirm Receipt, step 3

The buyer pays against the instructions printed on the Bill of Sale. There is no payment step of their own: the rail does not ask a buyer to attest that they sent money, because that attestation was worth nothing on its own. What matters is the seller saying it arrived, which is step 3.

At Confirm Receipt the seller confirms the funds and records how they came:

ACH transfer — the rail moves on immediately.
Check — the 10-day hold starts on the title. The title does not ship until the hold clears, or until somebody confirms the cheque cleared: cheques bounce, titles don't come back.

The funds themselves move off-platform, bank to bank. Cypress orchestrates and attests (who confirmed received, when, by what method) but never holds the purchase money. That is the whole reason this step exists: money is confirmed by the person it arrived to, not assumed by the system.

Payment routing was decided in Deal Setup: the funds go to the seller or, for a financed vehicle, to the lender, with the concrete account picked by the seller there.

The cheque hold protects the title, not the vehicle. The gate pass sits before Title Transfer, so on a cheque deal a vehicle can be released days before anyone knows the cheque is good. Cypress does not block that — a seller may hand over on trust — but from the moment a cheque is recorded, the Gate Pass and Vehicle Pickup steps ask "Has the buyer's cheque cleared?" so it stays a decision rather than an oversight. Answering releases the title's hold early.

The seller's commission — the paywall

The commission for a deal was snapshotted when the offer was created (from the channel's commission scheme) — accepting never re-prices it.

The invoice is raised when both sides confirm Deal Setup, not when the deal opens. The scheme can only be corrected until its invoice exists, so billing waits for the moment someone has actually looked at the deal — and Deal Setup is where the scheme is shown, and where it says whether it can still be changed. After that, a correction is a credit note.

How it is then collected depends on how the org bills:

Online (card) orgs — a real invoice is issued and the rail locks until it's paid: step 2 stays closed, with a payment window counting down. Pay by the embedded checkout and the rail unlocks the moment the payment lands.
Card on file — with a saved card the invoice is charged automatically the moment it is raised, and the rail never locks at all. See below.
ACH-billed and bank-transfer orgs — the fee is recorded as deferred, step 1 self-completes, and the amount rides into the org's next batch billing cycle. Nothing to do mid-deal.

The Commission Fee step names the method and the date: "Deferred (bank transfer): invoiced with this cycle's other sales on Oct 28, due Nov 7", or "Deferred (ACH): debited from your bank on Oct 28".

Whatever the method, an open invoice can always be paid now by card.

Card on file — paying without a payment step

A seller who pays per sale can save a card once and stop meeting a paywall on every deal. Saving a card is offered only to an org that pays per sale: on ACH or bank transfer the commission is invoiced with the cycle, and a card payment there is a one-off that is never saved. From then on the commission is charged off-session the moment the invoice is raised: no checkout, no window counting down, no step 2 waiting on a click.

Opting in happens in either of two places, and both are deliberate acts:

Billing → Payment settings, by saving a card outright; or
the checkout itself — paying an invoice offers "Save this card for future commissions", ticked by default. Unticking it pays that one invoice and saves nothing.

What you are told, and when. Confirming the seller's side of Deal Setup is what raises the invoice — and therefore what triggers the charge. So the seller's half of Deal Setup says so before the click: the amount, which card, that there is no separate payment step, and how to opt out. Afterwards the Commission Fee step reads AUTO-PAID, with the date it was charged, rather than a bare "Paid" — because on a card statement that charge has no click behind it, and a seller reconciling one needs to recognise it.

Opting out is a single action and takes effect immediately:

The seller removes the card in Billing → Payment settings.
A Cypress Manager removes it from the org's admin page, under Commission Card, on the org's behalf — the same act, for a seller who asks by phone.

Removing the card does not undo anything already charged; it means the next commission goes back to the ordinary invoice-and-pay path. A card that is declined also falls back to it: the invoice stays unpaid and the rail locks as it always did, so a failed auto-charge never silently loses a fee.

A commission is billed per sale — a vehicle sold twice (first deal cancelled, relisted, sold again) is two fees, each tied to its own deal.

Paid somewhere else

A fee settled by wire, deposit or cheque is recorded by a Cypress Manager against the invoice, with its method, reference and date. Stripe never moved that money, so there is no Stripe receipt for it and there cannot be — the proof is the invoice marked paid out of band plus that payment record, both shown on the Commission Fee step and in Billing. A partial payment is recorded but does not settle the fee: the rail stays closed until it is paid in full.

For a sale that happened entirely outside Cypress, the fee is raised and settled in one action — see Deals closed off-platform.

Worked example

Dan pays the Transit's $29,200 by check, against the instructions on the bill of sale. It arrives Tuesday; Maria confirms receipt at step 3, records that it came by cheque, and the 10-day hold starts on the title. The gate pass (step 4) proceeds meanwhile — carrying the question of whether the cheque has cleared, since releasing the vehicle before it does is Maria's call to make knowingly. Her bank clears it Friday, she says so, and the title's hold lifts early. Acme is ACH-billed, so its commission on the deal — $299 under the standard remarketing scheme — was deferred at step 1 and will appear on Acme's next batch invoice, where the story continues.

Business rules

Wire and cash aren't buyer options in the app; exceptional arrangements are recorded by the CM on the deal, on the record.
Failed or missing payments are Issues, with the thread and the clock to match.
Buyers never see commission figures anywhere — amounts and scheme names are the seller's business.
A $0 commission scheme is legitimate (promotional deals) and bills $0 — explicitly, not by accident.

Under the hood

The paywall has a single completion funnel — however a fee gets paid (checkout, webhook, or a CM recording a manual payment with proof), the same path unlocks the rail, so no payment route can leave a deal stuck. Stripe serves only the commission rail; Financial Connections powers the ACH mandate on the org. Integrators see CLOSING.PAYMENT.RECEIVED with method and reference in the webhooks.