Invoices and procurement: five gates a business must pass before buying relay capacity

Personal top-ups and corporate purchasing are different problems

An individual cares about price, stability and whether it works. A company also needs three more things: how the money leaves, how the invoice comes back, and who is liable when something breaks.

If any one of those blocks, procurement stalls even when every technical test passes.

Five gates

Gate 1: does the entity reconcile

Three names must connect:

1. the invoice header (who you are billing)
2. the recipient (whose account receives the money)
3. the operator named in the terms

Ideally all three match. Two common mismatches:

• Brand separate from operator: the site is A, the operator is company B. Normal, but ask for the relationship and put it in the contract.
• A personal recipient: no corporate capability, and this gate fails outright.

We have seen at least three entity types: limited company, sole proprietorship (getihu), and overseas entity. Their procurement behaviour differs sharply:

Gate 2: invoice type and tax rate

Three questions before ordering:

• Which invoice: ordinary VAT invoice or special VAT invoice
• What rate: modern services are typically 6%; small-scale taxpayers may be 3% or 1%
• What threshold: some sites say "invoices from 50 yuan", others "monthly accounts only"

The rate changes your real cost. On a 1,000 yuan quote, a 6% special invoice is deductible while a 3% ordinary invoice is not; the difference can exceed the price difference you were negotiating.

Gate 3: corporate account

Simple: can you pay account-to-account, and does the account name match the invoice header?

If the only option is a personal payment QR code, finance will struggle. Most expense policies do not accept technical service fees paid to an individual.

Gate 4: contract and SLA

Small purchases often skip contracts. For a company, at least get a short agreement covering four things:

1. Scope: model list, endpoint, concurrency ceiling
2. Billing: unit price, settlement cycle, reconciliation method
3. Availability: is there an SLA, and what happens if it is missed
4. Termination and refund: notice period, how remaining balance is returned

Note that many relay terms explicitly state no guarantee of uninterrupted service and no liability for indirect losses from upstream failures. That is the state of the industry. A more realistic contract asks for notification obligations (how early upstream changes are announced) and an exit mechanism (how balance is returned) rather than insisting on 99.9%.

Gate 5: data and compliance

Data residency, log retention and content moderation matter if your industry regulates them:

• Where data lives: domestic or overseas nodes
• How long it is kept: some terms state request text is retained 30 days, others state no retention
• Whether it can be used for training: check for language on this

This is a legal question, not an engineering one. Once the technical test passes, send the terms to legal.

Four documents to collect first

None are hard to obtain; a well-run operator sends all four in one go. Being unable to get them is itself the answer.

A pragmatic purchasing sequence

Step 1  Smallest possible order (100-500)
        purpose: confirm invoicing, crediting speed, support response
Step 2  Technical acceptance (1-2 weeks)
        purpose: latency, throughput, stability, quality checks
Step 3  Short agreement plus monthly settlement
        purpose: fix unit price, notice obligations, exit terms
Step 4  Monthly top-ups, no long prepayment
        purpose: cap exposure

Steps 1 and 3 are the ones most often skipped, and they determine the cost of fixing problems later.

Takeaways

• Entity, invoice type, corporate account, contract, data: all five gates.
• Sole proprietorships usually issue ordinary invoices; overseas entities cannot issue domestic ones.
• Tax rate differences can matter more than price differences.
• Ask for notification obligations and an exit mechanism instead of a 99.9% SLA.
• If the four documents cannot be produced, the vendor is not ready for business customers.