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Cord Payments Overview

The collection engine of your business. Card, bank transfer, bank debit, Mercado Pago, or manual transfer, with the money in your own account.

Cord Payments is the system you use to accept card payments, transfers that reconcile on their own (SPEI in Mexico and bank transfer with a reference in EUR, GBP, and USD), bank debit (SEPA, ACH, Bacs, or Canadian pre-authorized debit), or manual-transfer payments directly from a quote, an invoice, or your client’s invoice portal. The money lands in your own payments account and from there it is paid out to your bank account at the frequency you choose in Settings › Payments › Payouts: daily, weekly, or monthly.

On payments in Mexican pesos (MXN), Cord charges a per-transaction fee that you see and accept before you start collecting. On payments in any other currency, Cord applies no platform fee today. See the full fee schedule.

In Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Peru you can also collect with Mercado Pago, using your own Mercado Pago account.

Start now

Use Cord to accept online payments from the same quote link, automatically reconcile the payments that go through Cord, and — in Mexico, once your Digital Seal Certificate (CSD) is uploaded — stamp the CFDI for your sales.

Find your use case →
Payment page for Materiales del Valle's quote COT-0152: a $5,000.00 MXN deposit on a $10,000.00 MXN total, by card or SPEI transfer, with Mercado Pago as an alternative.

Goodbye manual reconciliations

In many businesses, receiving a payment means: asking the client to email the transfer receipt, sales forwarding it to finance, and finance searching for the exact deposit in the bank portal the next day to cross-reference it against the quote.

Cord Payments eliminates this process for online payments. Every online payment —by card, SPEI, bank transfer with a reference, or bank debit— is tied to its quote or its invoice and changes its status as soon as it is confirmed, with no receipts to cross-check by hand.

What you will learn in this section:

Activate and collect

  1. Accepting a payment: What your customer sees when paying from the quote or invoice link.
  2. Connect your account: Verifying your business, documents by country, phone capture, and account statuses.
  3. Cord Payments fees: How much Cord charges by method and currency, and how the fee is activated.
  4. Payment methods: Card, SPEI, bank transfer with a reference, bank debit, Mercado Pago, and manual transfer by country and currency, and how each one is confirmed.
  5. Mercado Pago: The second online payment rail, with your own account.

Payment models

  1. Upfront and balance: How to charge a percentage today and the rest later.
  2. Milestone payment plan: A quote split into 2 to 24 payments with a date or a condition, with optional interest if your client is a business.
  3. Installment payment plans: An overdue balance split into monthly installments from the same link.
  4. Monthly retainers: An automatic monthly card charge.
  5. Credit terms: Due on receipt and Net 7 to Net 90, and when payment is enabled.

Tracking the money

  1. Payments dashboard: Balance, payouts, fees, disputes, and recent payments.
  2. Payouts to your bank: Frequency, statuses, history, payout account by country, and paused payouts.
  3. Refunds and disputes and chargebacks: What to do when something doesn’t go as expected.

Invoicing

  1. Tax invoicing by country: CFDI 4.0 in Mexico (PUE or PPD, payment complement, global invoice, and replacement), invoices registered with Verifactu in Spain (beta), standard invoices with sales tax, VAT, or GST/HST in other markets (authorized by the tax authority in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru when issuing is active), and quotas per plan.
  2. Create, issue, and collect invoices: The full life of an invoice and its balance.
  3. Recurring invoices: Repeat an invoice every month without re-entering it.
  4. E-invoicing: Factur-X, XRechnung, Peppol BIS, and Facturae for every invoice of an EU business, and issuing through an approved platform in France.

The detail of each of the 12 countries —taxes, tax ID, document, authority, status, and online payments— lives in Invoicing by country, with one page per country.

Collections and treasury

  1. Automatic payment reminders: The email ladder before and after the due date.
  2. Invoice portal: One link per client with all their invoices, their balance per currency, and paying several at once.
  3. Automatic payments: Your client saves a method and Cord charges each invoice on its due date, with retries and notices.
  4. Receivables and operating collections and AI collections: How to follow up on what you’re owed.
  5. Treasury and FX Lock: Cash-flow forecast and locked exchange rates.

Direct charges to your own account

Cord Payments uses direct charges: when your customer pays, the payment is recorded in your own payments account, in your business’s name — it never passes through a Cord account. From there, the money is paid out to your bank account at the payout frequency you choose. Cord isn’t a middleman for the money — it’s the software layer that orchestrates the transaction, verifies your identity, and calculates the fee — in Mexico, it also issues the CFDI for that fee (see Fiscal invoicing by country).

This also means you’re the merchant of record for every payment — not Cord. You’re responsible to your customer for the goods or services sold, and to the bank for any chargeback. See Fees and advantages for the details.

What’s new

See what’s new in payments and invoicing: changes to invoice payments, credit notes, downloads from the invoice link, and plans.