Managing Customer payments, refunds, partial payments, payment types and reporting


This document will cover instructions in posting Customer Payments on Repair Orders including:

  1. Partial Payments
  2. Reversing Payments
  3. Payment Types
  4. Reporting.

Merchant services payments processed through terminal or remote pay are outside of the scope of this article.

Overview

It is important to understand some core fundamentals in how customer payments are managed. Below is a brief outline of some important details to be aware of. 

  • Customer payments can only be posted to Repair Orders
  • A payment can be posted on an RO in any state (Estimate, Work Order, Invoice). An RO does not have to become an Invoice in order to post a payment. 
  • Deletion of entered payments are not allowed, but entering a negative payment in order to reverse a previous entry can be facilitated. 
  • Payments are recorded at the time they are posted, however it is possible to change the date of a payment prior to posting it. 


Payment Tray Overview

The payment tray is organized into 7 sections, from top to bottom, they are:


1. Balance Summary

  • The Balance summary shows the total amounts previously posted to the RO  and the overall balance that remains outstanding.

2. Payment type

  • The payment type dropdown is where you will select the payment method of the payment you intend to post. This list is curated and managed in the Accounting tab of the Shop Settings page by your shop's Admin team (configuration covered below). 

3. Payment Date

  • Here you can control the date the payment is shown in reporting. Be advised that the time of the payment is not editable and will show the time it was posted. 

4. Payment Amount 

  • This field represents the payment amount you intend to post. 

5. Accounting Notes

  • Here you can communicate additional payment information such as name on card if it differs from the customer info on the RO, last 4 of cc #, auth code from a 3rd party processor, check #, etc. These details will be shown in the Payments report discussed below. 

6. Share settings / Picked up selection

  • These checkboxes allow you to select whether or not you care to share a payment receipt with the customer via the email associated to the customer record on the RO and if you wish to mark the invoice as picked up when posting the payment. 

7. Post Button

  • When all details are as you expect them, selecting this button will post the payment to the RO, enter it in the payment report, share a receipt (if selected), and mark the Invoice picked up (if selected). 

Partial Payments

Partial payments are simply a matter of applying the payment amount. The total due will adjust automatically. Just be sure to enter the amount, and select a payment type. 


 

Reversing a Payment

In order to reverse a payment, you will post a payment in a negative amount. You will accomplish this by prefacing the payment amount with a - symbol, like this -100 

This will effectively increase the balance due by the amount you post. 

If you have posted a payment in error, let's say it was the wrong payment type, a best practice would be to post the negative payment in the same type, and on the same day  the original incorrect payment was posted and include accounting notes to describe why this is appearing in the payment record. 


PaymentReversal.gif


 

Payment Types

Customer Payment Types can be curated and managed from the Accounting Settings tab found in Shop Settings. The defaults are Cash, Check, and Other.

New payment types can be created for Credit Card or Other. You will define the specific detail of these customer payment types by editing the payment name. This payment name will display in the dropdown on the RO, and in the Customer Payments reports. The order of how these payment types appear in the RO dropdown can be managed by clicking the double row of “freckles”, holding and moving the entry up or down in the list. 



 

Reporting

All customer posted payments are tracked in the application and can be viewed from the Reports Branch Invoices tab. There you will see a payments summary for the dates selected in the leftmost section labeled “payments”, organized by payment type. 


For deeper insights into each specific payment, export the Customer Payments report in a .csv format. This export will include more granular detail of every payment posted in the reporting range and include a link to the RO from where it is associated. 



Conclusion

We hope this documentation will help you to establish a good fundamental understanding of how customer payments work, and get you off to a running start.