Money rarely arrives in the shape the invoice expected. One customer pays three invoices with a single round figure. Another pays half now and half in three weeks. A third overpays, because they’d forgotten about a credit note they were holding.
None of that is unusual, and all of it is where a simple “paid” tick box starts to lie to you. So there isn’t one. What an invoice has been paid is worked out from the payments actually applied to it, which means a part payment is just a normal state of affairs, and money you can’t account for yet stays somewhere you’ll see it.
What you can do
- Register a payment against a sales invoice or a purchase document, in full or in part.
- Spread one payment across several documents, and see how much of it went where.
- Keep money you haven’t applied yet as credit on the account, rather than forcing it onto a document where it doesn’t belong.
- Apply that credit later, against whichever open document you choose.
- Take payment through a link on the invoice: card, bank transfer, iDEAL, PayPal or a UPI QR code.
- Match payments automatically when you import your bank statement.
- Attach proof of payment when someone sends you a screenshot of the transfer.
- See how long you’re actually waiting to be paid, measured rather than estimated.
- Find money you’ve received but can’t yet identify, sorted by how long it’s been sitting there.
How it works in practice
Register what arrived (the document → Payments → Register). Enter the amount, the date and how it came in. It gets applied to that document up to whatever’s still owing. If your customer sent more than the document needs, the extra isn’t forced onto it. It sits on their account as credit, and the screen tells you it’s there.
Apply that credit when you’re ready. An account holding credit shows an Apply button the next time you register a payment against one of its documents. Take all of it or part of it, and it draws from the oldest credit first, which is what an accountant would do by hand.
Let the bank do the matching (Finance → Bank). Import a statement and each line is offered against the open documents it might settle. Confirm a match and three things happen at once: the payment is registered, the document’s balance updates, and the journal gets written.
Money you can’t place goes somewhere sensible. When a payment turns up with a reference nobody recognises, we don’t guess. It goes to a holding account and appears on its own list (Reports → Finance → Unidentified receipts), grouped by age: under 30 days, 30 to 60, and older. Each line has an Identify button that takes you to the statement line to sort it out. The idea is that unidentified money becomes a short list someone works through, instead of a difference you discover at year end.
Get paid without waiting for a transfer. Connect a payment provider and your invoices can carry a link. Your customer pays it, and the payment shows up against the invoice on its own. Nobody re-keys anything, and nobody has to notice it happened.
Watch the ageing. Every payment records how many days it took from the document date, so days sales outstanding is something you measure rather than model. You’ll find it on the invoice reports, alongside what’s still open and what’s expected in the next thirty days.
Good to know
- An overpayment never quietly disappears. It becomes credit on the account and keeps asking to be dealt with. Test this in your first week: it’s the difference between a system that records what happened and one that records what somebody assumed.
- Two accounts do the quiet work - a holding account for unidentified receipts, and one for customer advances. If you don’t nominate accounts from your own chart, they’ll be created for you. Nominating them yourself takes ten minutes and keeps your chart looking like yours.
- Automatic matching is only as good as the reference your customer typed. Structured bank formats match far better than a statement full of free-text descriptions, and the manual route is there for everything else.
- Payment links need a provider account of your own - Mollie, PayPal or a UPI address, set up once. There’s no shared merchant account and nothing is taken here. You get paid through your own provider, on their terms.
- Deleting a payment releases what it was applied to, and those documents go back to owing what they owed. That’s correct, but it’s also why a payment entered against the wrong customer is worth fixing straight away rather than working around.