Recording a Customer Payment

A customer has paid you and the money has to land in two places: against the invoice it settles, and in the cashbook that matches your bank statement. By the end of this page you will have finalised a receipt voucher that does both, and you will know how to check that it did. A single-invoice receipt takes two minutes.

The one thing to get straight first. There is no “record payment” button on an invoice. Money in is its own document — a receipt voucher — and linking it to the invoice is a separate deliberate step called contra. A receipt that is finalised without a contra is not wrong; it becomes an unapplied receipt sitting as a credit on the customer’s account until somebody applies it. Most of the “the customer paid but the invoice still shows outstanding” questions are exactly this.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd sells through 22 branches, and its corporate customers buy on 30-day terms. Today one of them has transferred RM 42,468 against invoice SI-00019 — except the bank has taken RM 12 in charges, so RM 42,456 actually landed in the account. That is the receipt you will build.

Before you start

• The invoice is FINAL. A draft invoice is not an open document and will not appear in the contra search.
• Your settlement methods are set up — bank transfer, cash, cheque, each card type — each one pointed at the cashbook that receives it, with a GL code behind that cashbook, and made available to your branch. This is one-off work in the Cashbook applet. If it has not been done, Step 7 finalises a receipt that never reaches the cashbook.
• You can see the money. Do not raise a receipt from a customer’s promise; raise it from the bank statement, the transfer slip, or the cash in your hand.

Step 1: Start the receipt

Finance > Receipt Voucher (Internal) > Internal RCT Voucher > Create

The new document starts in TEMP status and becomes ACTIVE as soon as the branch and the customer are filled in.

Step 2: Fill in the header

Main Details tab

• Branch and location — where the money was received. Only branches you have permission for are listed.
• Transaction date — the date you received the money, not the date you are typing. This is the date that reaches the cashbook and therefore the date bank reconciliation will try to match.
• Reference — the customer’s remittance advice number, or the transfer reference. Your company may warn you if the same reference has been used before.
• Currency — for a foreign-currency receipt, set the rate. Zero and negative rates are refused.
• Remarks — this becomes the description on the journal. Write something a colleague could understand in six months.

Step 3: Choose the customer

Account tab

Pick the customer. Their billing details come across; the Payee sub-tab is for the rarer case where somebody else is paying on their behalf.

Step 4: Record what actually arrived

Settlement tab

Add one settlement line per way the money came in. A customer paying part in cash and part by card is two lines on one receipt.

For each line: the settlement method, the amount, the date and a reference. Cheques take a cheque number and date; card settlements take the card type; loyalty settlements take voucher and points fields.

For GadgetSphere: one line, bank transfer, RM 42,468, with the transfer reference.

Step 5: Deal with the bank charges

Expenses tab

Add an expense line for the RM 12. Expense lines are deductions taken out of the receipt — bank charges, transfer fees — and they reduce what is banked without reducing what the customer is credited with.

The Revenue tab, next to it, is the opposite case: money that arrived but is not against any invoice. A deposit, a miscellaneous sale, a refund of something. Revenue lines post like sales lines and carry their own tax.

Step 6: Apply it to the invoice — the step that clears the balance

Contra tab

Search the customer’s open documents, find SI-00019, and set the amount to apply.

This is the step that reduces the invoice’s outstanding balance. Skip it and the money is still recorded, still in the cashbook, still on the customer’s account — but the invoice stays open and the ageing report stays wrong.

For a partial payment, apply what you have. The invoice’s open balance drops by that much and the rest stays outstanding. There is nothing else to configure: a payment plan in BigLedger is simply several receipt vouchers, each contra’d against the same invoice.

For an overpayment or a payment on account, contra what you can and finalise. The remainder stays as an unapplied receipt and can be contra’d against a later invoice.

The total contra cannot exceed the receipt’s own amount unless your company has allowed that.

Step 7: Finalise

Click FINAL. The applet checks that there is at least one settlement line; the backend checks that the date is in an open period, then locks the document. Everything else — the cashbook lines, the journal, the contra — is posted by background jobs a moment later.

That matters for one failure. If a settlement method has no cashbook behind it, or its cashbook has no GL code, FINAL still succeeds: the receipt locks, and it is the posting job that fails with MISSING_CASHBOOK: STL_MTHD [code] or MISSING_GL_CODE: STL_MTHD [code]. You end up with a FINAL receipt, no cashbook line for bank reconciliation to match, and no journal — and the only places it shows are the receipt’s Posting tab and Financial Report > Error Checking > Trace Document. The fix is a configuration job in the Cashbook applet, not something you can do on this screen; once the method is mapped, Resolve on Trace Document re-runs the posting.

On success, three things happen, a moment after FINAL:

• A cashbook line per settlement line, in the cashbook behind that settlement method. These are the lines bank reconciliation will match against your statement.
• The journal. The cashbook’s GL account is debited with what was banked, the settlement charge goes to your company’s settlement-charges account, and the customer’s receivable account is credited with what they paid.
• The contra is applied, so the invoice’s open balance and the customer’s ageing both drop.

The TraceDocument tab shows you the journal and cashbook rows it created. Open it once, on your first receipt, so you know what it looks like when it is right.

If you got it wrong

Before finalising: just edit it, or DISCARD the draft.

After finalising, a wrong settlement line — wrong method, wrong reference, wrong amount — is corrected in Settlement Adjustment (or the Payment Adjustment tab), without voiding anything. You need the SHOW_EDIT_SETTLEMENT_FINAL permission; if the screen refuses to let you edit, that is why. This is the right tool; reach for it before you reach for VOID.

If the cashbook line has already been matched in bank reconciliation, BigLedger refuses the change and tells you which reconciliation is holding it. Un-match it there, make the adjustment, then match it again.

VOID reverses the journal and the cashbook lines and releases the contra. Use it when the receipt should not exist at all — money that never arrived, a duplicate.

What success looks like

One minute, immediately after finalising:

1. Open the TraceDocument tab. There is a journal and a cashbook row, and the cashbook named is the one your bank statement corresponds to.
2. Open the invoice SI-00019. Its outstanding amount is RM 0.00 — or the expected remainder, for a partial payment.
3. Open the Statement of Account for that customer. The receipt appears against the invoice, not floating on its own.

If step 3 shows the receipt on its own line with the invoice still open, you finalised without a contra. Go back and apply it.

Common mistakes

Related documentation