Product

POS with built-in charge accounts: what to look for

A POS that can invoice customers is not the same as one that runs charge accounts, so here is the thirteen-point checklist for real charge accounts, a six-step demo script, and straight answers on how Rundoo measures up, limits included.

Titus Capilnean, Head of Marketing October 6, 2026

If you already know how house accounts work and you just need a refresher on limits, statements, aging, and finance charges, our explainer on house accounts, statements, aging, and finance charges covers the mechanics. This guide is the next step: which POS actually does all of it, and what to ask before you find out the hard way. Bring the checklist below to any vendor demo. It works on everybody, including us.

Invoicing is not a charge account

An invoice is a record of a sale that already happened. A charge account is an ongoing credit relationship between your store and a customer, and it has moving parts an invoice never touches. Can the contractor charge at the register, or does someone have to create a document afterwards? Does the system stop the sale when he's over his limit, or does it politely suggest someone look into it later? When the month closes, does the system generate his statement, age his balance, assess a finance charge on what's late, and let him pay it off from his phone?

A general-retail POS that "can invoice" usually means it can email a PDF with a balance due. That is fine for a bike shop. It is not fine for a store where a third of the week's revenue walks out the door on a signature and a handshake, and where your April statement run is how you get paid for March. The difference only shows up after you're live, which is exactly why you test for it before you sign.

The thirteen-point checklist

Thirteen things, each one a place where a system either carries your accounts or quietly doesn't. For each, there's what to look for and the one question that pins the salesperson down.

1. Charge as a tender, not an afterthought

Look for: Charge sitting right next to Cash, Card, and Check as a payment type at the register. The cashier checks out the contractor, taps Charge, done. No "create invoice" button in a back-office menu, no document generated after the fact.

Ask: "Show me a cashier charging a sale to an account at the register, start to finish, without leaving the checkout screen."

2. Credit limits that actually limit

Look for: Whether the limit is a hard block or a warning the cashier can wave through with a tap. A warning is not a limit, it's a suggestion. Also look for a separate credit hold flag, so you can stop charging on an account that's behind without deleting its limit.

Ask: "If this sale puts the account over its limit, what exactly happens on the screen, and can the cashier override it?"

3. Terms per customer

Look for: Terms set on the customer record: cash, net 30, net 60, net 90. And ask what "cash terms" really does. In a real system, a customer on cash terms can't charge at all, because cash terms means cash.

Ask: "Can I set different terms per customer, and does cash terms actually block charging?"

4. Statement runs you control

Look for: A statement day set per customer, so your farm accounts can close on the first and your contractors on the 25th if that's how you run it. Open-item versus balance-forward statements. Condensed versus full line-item detail. Delivery by email or printed for mailing, and a straight answer on who does the mailing, because somebody folds and stamps those envelopes and it might be you.

Ask: "Run a statement for one customer right now, and show me the condensed and the detailed version."

5. Finance charges you can manage, not just apply

Look for: A rate set per customer, whether it compounds, and when it's assessed: daily, monthly, on the statement run, or manually when you decide. Just as important, whether you can remove a finance charge before statements go out. You'll waive one for the contractor who's been with you for twenty years, and the system should let you.

Ask: "Apply a finance charge to this account, then take it back off before the statement prints."

6. Aging you can read at a glance

Look for: Two reports, minimum: aging by customer (one line per account, bucketed) and an aging detail report (every open invoice behind that line). The buckets should be readable in ten seconds on a Monday morning, not exported to a spreadsheet for massaging.

Ask: "Show me who's past 60 days right now, then drill into one account's invoices."

7. Job accounts under a parent

Look for: Sub-accounts under a parent customer, one per job, each with its own pricing and its own credit limit capped at the parent's. This is how a contractor's kitchen remodel on Elm Street stays separate from his spec build across town, and how you keep one rogue job from consuming his whole line.

Ask: "Set up a job under this contractor's account with its own limit, and show me that it can't exceed the parent's."

8. Authorized buyers

Look for: A list of who may charge to an account, a "require buyer on every sale" switch, and a signature captured on the receipt. When the statement goes out and someone says "my crew never bought that," the receipt with a name and a signature is the whole conversation.

Ask: "Require a named buyer on this account and show me what the cashier sees when an unauthorized person tries to charge."

9. How the customer pays

Look for: Every channel: in person at the counter, by phone, in a customer app. By card and by bank transfer (ACH), because plenty of contractors would rather pay a big statement by ACH than put it on a card. Partial payments against selected invoices. Autopay on the statement day for the customers who'd rather never think about it.

Ask: "Can a customer pay just two of five open invoices from their phone by ACH tonight?"

10. Surcharge exemptions per customer

Look for: The ability to exempt a specific customer from your card surcharge, by default, on their record. If you've told an account "no card fee for you" as part of keeping their business, the system has to keep that promise at the register and in the app, every time. (Surcharge rules also vary by state, so check the credit card surcharge laws by state for yours, and our piece on cash discount vs surcharge for which model fits a store with accounts.)

Ask: "Exempt this account from the surcharge and show me a card payment that skips it."

11. Pricing that follows the account

Look for: Contractor price tiers tied to the account, so the price follows the customer to the register no matter which of his crew members walks in or which job he's charging to. If your "contractor pricing" lives in a laminated card by the till, the POS isn't carrying it, your cashiers are.

Ask: "Check out the same item for a walk-in and then for this contractor's job account, and show me the two prices."

12. What your accountant sees

Look for: Where receivables actually live. The clean setup is AR in the POS with a daily summary journal into QuickBooks. The messy one is every invoice pushed to QuickBooks as an open invoice, which means you now have two AR ledgers and someone's Tuesdays disappear reconciling them. Ask who that someone is. We wrote up what a POS actually posts to QuickBooks if you want the long version.

Ask: "After a day of charge sales and payments, what exactly lands in QuickBooks, and in how many pieces?"

13. Migration of your existing accounts

Look for: Whether open balances, aging, and payment history come across from your current system, or whether go-live day starts every customer at zero with the real balances stranded in a printout. Your accounts are the crown jewels; moving them is not a nice-to-have. We wrote up what transfers in a POS data migration so you know what to demand.

Ask: "Show me a migrated customer's open balance and aging in the new system before we go live."

A demo script

Don't let the vendor drive the demo. You drive. Six things, live, in this order, and watch closely for anyone reaching for the words "you'd just" or "our support team can set that up later."

Charge a sale to a job account over its limit. This single test covers items 1, 2, and 7 at once. If the sale goes through with nothing but a warning banner, you've learned what you needed.
Run a statement for one customer. Pick one, generate it, look at it. If running a statement requires closing a batch, calling support, or waiting for month-end, imagine doing that for two hundred accounts.
Apply a finance charge and remove it. Both directions, before the statement goes out.
Show aging. The by-customer view, then drill into the detail. Time how long it takes to answer "who owes me money and how late are they."
Pay an invoice from the customer's phone by ACH. Hand them an imaginary phone and make them walk the customer's path, not the staff's.
Show what landed in QuickBooks the next morning. One summary, or four hundred open invoices? Your bookkeeper will want to know, in the specific tone bookkeepers use.

Any system that does all six live, without a sidebar, is at least in the running. Any system that can't, isn't, no matter what the brochure says.

How Rundoo handles charge accounts

Same checklist, straight answers, including where we fall short. Verified against the product, support threads, and our public feature board. Across 500+ independent stores in the US and Canada, stores on Rundoo have cut receivables by 25%, and the features below are why.

Charge at the register. Charge account is a tender at the POS, alongside the rest. The credit limit is a hard block: when a sale would exceed it, the Charge tender is blocked and there is no per-sale override. There's a separate Credit hold flag for accounts you need to stop without touching their limit.

Terms. Cash, Net 30, Net 60, Net 90, set per customer. A customer on Cash terms cannot charge.

Statements. A statement day per customer, generated automatically, open-item or balance-forward, condensed or full detail. Delivered by email, or generated as a PDF packet your store prints and mails. Here's the plain part: Rundoo does not mail statements for you and does not send them by text. If a mailing service is a dealbreaker, that's a real gap.

Finance charges. Per customer, with a rate and compounding, assessed daily, monthly, on statement runs, or manually. Removable before statements go out, for the contractor who's earned it.

Aging. Aging by customer and Aging detail reports. The Customer app shows your customer their own balance by aging bucket: current, 1 to 30, 31 to 60, and 61 and over, which does half your collections phone calls for you.

Job accounts and authorized buyers. Job accounts sit under a parent customer, each with its own pricing and its own credit limit capped at the parent's. Authorized buyers are set per contact, with a "Require buyer on every sale" switch and a receipt-signature requirement per customer.

Payments. In the Customer app, your customers see their balance, invoices, and statements, and can pay a statement, the total, or selected invoices by saved card, new card, or ACH. Autopay can run on the statement day, and finance charges are payable in the app. Payments post to receivables immediately. A card payment carries your store's surcharge if you've set one, ACH carries none, and a customer can be exempted from the surcharge by default on their account.

Pricing. Contractor and customer-tier pricing follows the account to the register, whoever walks in. We've written about how this plays out in contractor charge accounts for paint stores, and about running statements, aging and finance charges across every kind of store in house accounts, statements, and finance charges.

Accounting. Receivables live in Rundoo. QuickBooks Online gets one daily summary journal, automatic, every night. QuickBooks Desktop gets a daily .IIF file your bookkeeper imports. Per-customer balances and aging stay in Rundoo and are not pushed to QuickBooks. One direction, Rundoo to QuickBooks, so there's exactly one AR ledger to reconcile.

Migration. Rundoo migrates products, customers, sales history, pricing tiers, and balances from your current system. The details are in what transfers in a POS data migration.

What Rundoo doesn't do, so nobody's surprised in month three: no automatic credit holds and no AR write-off tools, no overdue text alerts, no SMS statements, no statement mailing service, and no cashier override of a credit limit. Some of these are on the roadmap; some are deliberate. If your store depends on one of them, ask us about it directly before you decide.

Frequently asked questions

What is a POS with charge accounts?

It is a point of sale where store-issued credit is built into the system itself, not bolted on: Charge works as a tender at the register, every customer carries a credit limit, terms, and statement day, and the system handles statements, aging, finance charges, and payments against the balance. The test is whether the whole lifecycle of an account, from the first charged sale to the final payment, happens in one place without spreadsheets or a separate AR tool.

Can Square or a generic POS do house accounts?

Ask them the thirteen questions in the checklist above, live, in the demo, and you will have your answer inside an hour. The pattern most stores report is that general-retail systems can email an invoice with a balance due, which feels close until you need credit limits that block, statement runs, aging buckets, and finance charges. Invoicing a customer and carrying their account are different jobs, so make the vendor prove each point rather than assuring you it is covered.

Do charge accounts sync to QuickBooks?

That depends entirely on the system, and it is one of the most important questions on the list. Two clean patterns exist: receivables live in the POS with a daily summary into QuickBooks, or every invoice syncs over as an open invoice, which leaves you maintaining two AR ledgers. Ask the vendor to show you what a normal Tuesday of charge sales and payments looks like in QuickBooks on Wednesday morning before you commit. Our article on what a POS actually posts to QuickBooks goes deeper.

What's the difference between open-item and balance-forward statements?

An open-item statement lists every unpaid invoice individually until each one is paid, so a customer sees exactly which invoices make up the balance. A balance-forward statement rolls last month's unpaid amount into a single carried figure and lists only the new activity. Contractors often want open-item because they pay by invoice against a job; either way, your POS should offer both and let you choose per customer.

Can I bring my existing balances and aging to a new POS?

You should insist on it, because your open balances are money your customers already owe you and starting everyone at zero is not an option. Ask the vendor to show you a migrated customer's balance, aging, and payment history inside the new system before go-live, not in a promise on a slide. Our guide to what transfers in a POS data migration lays out what a proper migration includes so you can hold any vendor to it.

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