Getting paid

Before you start, open these pages: Cash / Transactions, Sales / Orders, Sales / Invoices and Cash / Cash Accounts.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Money coming in is recorded as a transaction. What that money pays off depends on whether an invoice exists yet. For real goods, it usually does not.

Two things a payment can pay off

An invoice payment pays off a document that already says what is owed. That is what happens for memberships, tickets and credits, and for anything you invoice up front.

A customer advance is money taken against an order, before there is any invoice. This is the normal path for real goods, for the reason in lesson 1: the order can still change, so the invoice waits.

An advance is not a sale yet.

It is money you are holding, and you owe the customer either the goods or their money back. It only becomes a sale when the invoice is written.

That is why it is recorded as its own kind of movement. If you counted it as a sale the day the cash arrived, you would count the same sale again when the invoice came.

An advance belongs to one order

Not to the customer. To the exact order they paid for.

A pot of money held against the customer would be more flexible. But then it has to answer a question: which of these six orders did this 40,000 pay for?

No automatic rule gets that right, and every accountant eventually asks it. Holding it per order means the answer is built in.

There is a cost, and it is worth knowing. An advance cannot be moved to a different order. A customer who cancels and orders again gets a refund and pays again.

What happens when the invoice appears

   payment     ->  held as an advance on the order   (you owe them)
   goods go    ->  the order may still change
   invoice     ->  the advance is applied to it      (now they owe you nothing)
                   NO second payment, nothing banked twice

Applying the advance clears the invoice without any cash moving. The cash was banked the day it arrived.

So if you are looking at a customer’s account and an invoice appears already paid with no payment recorded against it, that is why.

If the order got smaller than what they paid, or was cancelled, the difference goes back as a refund. That is the one movement here that really does take cash out again.

Where the money landed still matters

Every payment names the cash account it arrived in. The till, the bank, the mobile money wallet.

That is what makes your cash position real, instead of a total that is not attached to anywhere money actually sits.

Part payments

Record what actually arrived. Whatever is left owing is what it is.

Do not reduce an invoice to match a short payment.

The invoice says what was owed. The payment says what came in. The gap between them is the thing you need to be able to see. An invoice edited to match its payment can never be chased.

Paying online

Where a payment gateway is set up, customers pay from a link and the money lands against the right thing on its own. The invoice if there is one, or the order as an advance if there is not.

One exception worth knowing. An invoice opened directly from its own link is always paid as an invoice, because whoever sent that link decided the document was final.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, pay for a physical order from the public side, then open the order. The money is held against it, with no invoice yet. Now raise the invoice and watch the advance apply itself, with no second payment.