Executive summary
- What changed: You can waive an order's payable balance from the payment card on the order page when you decide not to collect it, and remove an existing waiver from the same place.
- Why it matters: Short payments and goodwill write-offs become an auditable action on the order instead of a workaround that distorts refunds, discounts, or sold quantity.
- Who should care: Finance and accounts receivable teams, B2B operators selling on net terms, and anyone whose service staff currently zero out balances with fake refunds.
What changed
Waiving is now a first-class action with four supporting parts.
- Automatic adjustment. Shopify adjusts existing waived amounts during order editing, refunds, and returns processing. If the order total falls below the waived amount, only the excess is reversed, starting with the oldest waived amount.
- Buyer visibility. Waived balances appear wherever applicable on buyer-facing surfaces, including customer accounts, checkout, and email notifications.
- A dedicated permission. Staff need the new Waive order balances admin permission. High-privilege roles such as Store admin have it by default.
- Write-off reporting. New write-off metrics and dimensions are available, and a Write-offs by order report ships as a default report on all stores.
Why it matters
On B2B orders settled on net terms, a meaningful share never settle at the invoiced amount. Freight disputes, damage allowances, rounding on a partial shipment, and plain goodwill all leave a small residual balance that nobody intends to chase. Until now Shopify gave you three bad options: refund against a payment that never arrived, edit the order and distort the quantity sold, or leave the balance open and reconcile it in the ERP. Each one corrupts a different number in your reporting.
Waiving keeps sold quantity, revenue, and tax intact and records the uncollected amount as a write-off, which is what your general ledger actually wants. The fact that it arrives as a distinct permission and a distinct report matters as much as the action itself: you can delegate small write-offs to service staff without losing the ability to audit them at month end. If you are structuring terms-based selling on Plus, this complements how you set up B2B price lists and net payment terms.
Role-specific impact
- Marketers: Goodwill gestures stop landing in discount reporting. Promotional performance gets cleaner once service credits are classified as write-offs rather than as discounts applied at checkout.
- Developers: Audit your ERP and OMS mappings before enabling this. A waived balance is neither a refund nor a discount. Confirm how your middleware reads financial status and outstanding balance, and map write-offs to the correct GL account rather than the discount bucket.
- Store admins: Grant the permission deliberately and set a value threshold in policy, since the permission itself has no limit. Add the Write-offs by order report to your month-end review.
Use-case example
Real-world scenario
A building products distributor on Plus takes around 2,900 B2B orders a month on net 30, and roughly 40 settle short by freight or damage adjustments under 50 dollars each. Accounts receivable was writing those off in NetSuite while the Shopify order stayed permanently open, so the open-balance queue sat near 120 orders and the close required a manual reconciliation pass. After moving write-offs into Shopify, with the permission granted to two AR staff and a 250 dollar policy threshold above which a controller signs off, the queue settled under 20 orders and the reconciliation step came off the close checklist.
Implementation checklist
- Decide which roles receive the Waive order balances permission, and confirm which roles already hold it by default.
- Write a threshold policy, for example staff waive under 250 dollars and a controller approves above that.
- Map write-offs to a bad debt or allowance GL account in your ERP integration, separate from refunds and discounts.
- Waive a test order end to end and confirm what the buyer sees in customer accounts and email notifications.
- Test the interaction with order editing and returns, including the case where the order total drops below the waived amount.
- Add the Write-offs by order report to your monthly finance cadence and set a review owner.
- Retire the fake-refund and discount-code workarounds and document the new path for service staff.
FAQ
Q: Is a waived balance the same as a refund?
A: No. A refund returns money you collected. A waiver records money you chose not to collect, leaving revenue and tax on the order intact. Treat them as separate accounting events in any integration.
Q: What happens if we edit the order after waiving part of the balance?
A: Shopify adjusts the waiver automatically. If the new total falls below the waived amount, only the excess is reversed, oldest waived amount first.
Resources
Shopify Help Center: managing orders
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