Settle invoice

Settle Invoice

Prepare one invoice for the canonical spend lane. The native payment.invoice_plan tool validates the invoice, payee identity, selected rail, profile, idempotency seed, and complete parent payment AuthorityTerm.

Use this skill when an invoice is the source business document and the operator needs to know whether it can be represented as one exact governed payment. It keeps invoice validation separate from money movement: a ready result is a reviewable spend handoff, not a paid invoice. Use spend directly when the payment signal is already structured and validated.

This skill plans only. It never approves a spend, contacts a provider, moves money, or claims settlement. A ready plan has provider_effect.status: not_started and money_moved: false.

Contract

• Amounts are positive integer minor units and currency is uppercase ISO 4217.
• The payee has name, party_ref, and exactly one opaque settlement_ref or SHA-256 settlement_digest. Raw account and routing fields are refused.
• parent_payment_authority is a full typed term. Native quote validation requires bounded per-call and aggregate limits, the selected rail, realm, payee, invoice.settle operation, and single-use capability authority.
• Supported executable handoff rails are mock, mpp, and stripe-spt, matching actual spend runners. Unsupported rails return blocked; the skill never labels an unavailable ACH or x402 path ready.
• rail_profile_ref and idempotency_seed are explicit and pass unchanged. Hosted payment_admission and realm pass through only when supplied.

A ready_for_spend plan names skill: spend, the executable runner, and the exact validated inputs. A blocked plan has no downstream handoff and lists the failed bounds. Approval and rail evidence belong to downstream spend.

Stop conditions

• Block missing invoice identity, non-positive or non-integer minor units, malformed currency, or ambiguous payee identity.
• Refuse raw bank-account or routing material; accept only an opaque settlement ref or stable settlement digest.
• Block an unsupported rail or any invoice outside the parent authority's amount, currency, counterparty, operation, realm, or aggregate bounds.
• Do not interpret an existing approval note as downstream spend approval.
• Preserve the same profile and idempotency seed in the handoff; do not silently regenerate them.

Example

An invoice for 25000 AUD identifies a supplier by party ref and opaque Stripe settlement ref. If the parent authority permits that supplier, currency, invoice.settle operation, rail, and ceiling, the skill returns the exact spend:stripe-spt inputs. If the invoice requests ACH—which no canonical runner supports—the result is blocked rather than a vague “ready” plan. In both cases, no payment has occurred.