Wholesale Handler
The date has to be closed, not discouraged
Writing a deadline in an email leaves you the one enforcing it, against a customer you like, who has a reason. Most people say yes, which is the right human answer and the wrong operational one.
The alternative is that the closed date is simply not selectable. Wholesale Handler works out which dates are open each time a customer opens the order form, and checks it again when they submit, so a stale page cannot be used to slip an order through after the deadline.
Every delivery day gets its own deadline
A cutoff belongs to a delivery day rather than to your business. Each day you deliver on carries its own deadline, set as a lead time before that day, so Monday can close on Friday afternoon while Thursday stays open until Wednesday night.
Wholesale Handler cannot store a delivery day without one, so there is no way to end up with a day that quietly accepts anything. A cutoff can also land on the delivery day itself, which is what makes same-day ordering possible where the work allows it.
These live on the order profile, so different customer groups can run different deadlines without duplicating your products.
What a closed date tells the customer
A closed date cannot be selected, and a short label sits beside it. There are two labels:
A date whose deadline has already passed shows the same label as any other closed date. Dates further ahead than a customer may order are not listed at all.
You can add your own line on top of these in settings - the place to say what to do about a genuine emergency, so the answer is on screen rather than in your phone.
Locking an order after it is placed
Closing the date stops a new order. A separate setting decides how long an existing one stays updateable.
The order lock window runs from Until cutoff, where the deadline governs alone, through 6 fixed windows between 15 minutes and 24 hours after placing, to Immediately.
The two are independent ceilings and whichever lands first wins. A 24-hour window on an order placed an hour before its cutoff still locks at the cutoff, so the window can only ever shorten the time an order stays open, not extend it past the deadline.
You can still say yes
The cutoff binds your customers, not you. Placing an order yourself lets you override the date check, so a late one is a decision you make case by case with the reason in front of you.
That is the arrangement worth having. The system holds the line by default, and the exceptions stay yours rather than becoming a rule that quietly stops applying.
