A cautionary tale if you have customers who use Coupa

We learned the very very very hard way that next-day Marketplace invoicing does NOT play nicely with Coupa. Here's what happened:

Back in April, we closed a Marketplace transaction via private offer with one of our enterprise customers. Not a new customer, either - this was for a license extension with a current customer with which we'd transacted through Marketplace twice before.

30 days go by, and Partner Center still shows the invoice as 'uncollected.'

60 days go by, and Partner Center still shows the invoice as 'uncollected.'

I open a ticket with Marketplace support. And kudos to them, they pick up my ticket within an hour. "Customer hasn't paid the invoice," they tell us.

So now we are forced to take on the role of collections agency for a Microsoft invoice our customer hasn't paid and for which we don't know why they haven't paid.  (Partner Center's Revenue reports are rather light on useful details.)

Our buyer inside the customer also has no idea why the invoice wasn't paid:  She sits far away from the folks who pay the Microsoft bills. Her colleague in IT who pushed the buttons to purchase the private offer likewise has no idea why the invoice wasn't paid:  He too sits far away from accounts payable.

We're baffled because never before have we had any delay in getting our payouts for this customer's Marketplace purchases. Our first thought is okay, maybe they now have custom net 60 payment terms with Microsoft. (A different issue we experienced on a different delayed payout back in January!)

After ten days of intensive investigations involving nearly a dozen different people, we finally discover the source of the issue:  The customer pays its Microsoft bills through Coupa, BUT:  they did NOT know about nor integrate into Coupa workflow the (relatively new) next-day invoicing mechanism for Marketplace transactions.

For their accounts payable team, if an invoice doesn't land in Coupa, it doesn't exist. The invoice for this Marketplace purchase was generated, but it got sent . . . nowhere, I guess?  

So in picking up my support ticket, Marketplace Support could only say "Customer hasn't paid the invoice." They probably had no way to know the correct response was "Customer hasn't received the invoice."

Moral of the story: Ask your customers if they use Coupa. And if yes, prepare them for the possibility they might not receive the invoice for your software.