How do I get a customer's payment onto the right invoice? Recording a customer payment

“How do I get a customer’s payment onto the right invoice?” Record the money on a receipt voucher, then apply it to that invoice on the voucher’s Contra tab before you finalise (Step 6); a receipt finalised without a contra is still in the cashbook, but it sits on the customer’s account unapplied and the invoice stays open.

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.

The chain, end to end:

    flowchart LR
  RV["Receipt Voucher<br/>settlement lines"] -->|"FINAL, background job"| CB["Cashbook line<br/>per settlement line"]
  RV -->|"FINAL, background job"| J["<b>Journal</b><br/>credits the<br/>receivable account"]
  RV -.->|"contra, second request"| SI["Sales Invoice<br/>Outstanding and<br/>ageing drop"]
  CB -->|"matched by"| BR["Bank reconciliation"]
  

Recording a customer payment, at a glance

1. Start the receipt.
2. Fill in the header, with the date the money arrived.
3. Choose the customer.
4. Record what actually arrived.
5. Deal with the bank charges.
6. Apply it to the invoice, the step that clears the balance.
7. Finalise.

Steps 1 to 4 are on this page; Steps 5 to 7 are on Apply the receipt and finalise it. What each figure is, and what the receipt touches elsewhere has a page of its own.

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.
• The receipt is raised in the company that issued the invoice, for the customer it was issued to. The Contra tab lists only that customer’s open invoices in the receipt’s own company. A payment for a GadgetSphere Online (GSO) invoice keyed as a GadgetSphere (GS) receipt has nothing to apply itself to.
• 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 the journal, and therefore the date bank reconciliation will try to match. The date on each settlement line in Step 4 is not copied to the cashbook line; this one is.
• 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 42,456, with the transfer reference.

Next: Steps 5 to 7, the bank charges, the contra and FINAL.

Steps 5 to 7, in brief

Step 5: Deal with the bank charges

Add an expense line for what the bank kept, on a GL-code item that points at your bank-charges account and has no tax code, so the customer is credited with the whole invoice. If the charge is set on the settlement method instead, skip the expense line: one route or the other, never both (Step 5).

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

On the Contra tab, find the invoice and set the amount to apply. Skip it and the money is still recorded, but the invoice stays open and the ageing report stays wrong (Step 6).

Step 7: Finalise

Click FINAL. The cashbook lines and the journal are posted by background jobs a moment later, and the contra is applied by a second request from the applet. Either can fail after the receipt is FINAL: a posting job fails when a settlement method has no cashbook or GL code behind it, and a failed contra shows only a brief red toast and is never retried (Step 7).

When the payment does not fit this page

The receipt voucher is for money that arrives after an invoice, from a customer on account. Other ways money arrives use other routes, and choosing the wrong one creates work:

• Paid at the counter, at the time of sale. Take the payment on the cash bill itself, in the till or the cash bill screen, rather than raising a receipt afterwards: the settlement is part of the document, its Doc Open Amount is zero from the start, and nothing needs applying. See the cash sales workflow.
• A credit note, not money. A credit note settles an invoice through the same contra mechanism, and you apply it from the Debtor Report applet rather than raising a receipt.
• A marketplace payout. Payouts arrive net of the marketplace’s fees and settle many orders at once. They have their own routine, and for some marketplaces a background job can create the receipt for you if your company has it scheduled; check before keying one by hand, or you count it twice. See reconciling marketplace payouts.
• Many receipts from a bank file. The applet’s Import Receipt Voucher screen takes them in bulk, but a row marked FINAL in the file skips the checks the FINAL button runs; read that section before you rely on it.
• A deposit before the invoice exists. Take it where the order is: creating a sales order, Step 5, sets out the two places a deposit can be recorded and what each does when the invoice follows.

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. It appears only on a FINAL voucher, and only when two things are both true: your company has switched on Enable Edit Settlement for Finalized Documents in the applet’s Application Settings, and your login holds the SHOW_EDIT_SETTLEMENT_FINAL permission. With either missing, the Payment Adjustment tab and the Settlement Adjustment menu entry are simply not there; ask your administrator for both. That is deliberate: who may change a settlement after it reached the cashbook is decided at the screen. This is the right tool; reach for it before you reach for VOID.

Check one thing first: if the receipt falls in a month you have already reconciled against the bank, the adjustment deletes its cashbook line and writes a replacement, so the match goes and the bank statement line reopens — and unlike an ordinary amount edit, nothing refuses it. Unreconcile that line, adjust, then match the new one (why).

If the cashbook line has already been matched in bank reconciliation and you change the amount by editing the receipt rather than through Settlement Adjustment, BigLedger refuses the change and tells you which reconciliation is holding it. Un-match it there, make the change, then match it again. Settlement Adjustment is not checked this way, which is why the paragraph above asks you to unreconcile first.

VOID reverses the journal, removes the cashbook lines (and hands any matched amount back to the bank statement line) and deletes the contra, so the invoice goes back to outstanding. Use it when the receipt should not exist at all — money that never arrived, a duplicate. If only the allocation is wrong — right money, wrong invoice — a login holding the delete contra permission (SHOW_DELETE_CONTRA) can remove the contra from the receipt’s Contra tab and apply a new one, without voiding anything. Both invoices’ Outstanding figures are rewritten as you do it, and the stored month-end ageing for the months the contra touched is worked out again.

If the receipt was keyed to the wrong customer or in the wrong company, a contra cannot reach the right invoice, because the Contra tab lists only that customer’s items in that company: void the receipt and key it again where it belongs.

What success looks like

One minute, immediately after finalising:

1. Open the receipt’s TraceDocument tab. There is a journal and a cashbook row, the cashbook named is the one your primary bank statement corresponds to, and the cashbook amount is RM 42,456.00, what landed.
2. Open the invoice SI-00019 and its ARAP tab. Outstanding reads RM 0.00, or the expected remainder for a partial payment. Doc Open Amount still reads RM 42,468.00 and Contra reads the same amount with a minus sign. Doc Open not falling is correct; Outstanding is the figure that says the invoice is paid.
3. Run the Outstanding Document Report in the Debtor Report applet for this customer in this company. Neither SI-00019 nor the receipt is listed.

If the receipt is still listed with a negative balance and the invoice beside it, the contra never landed: open the receipt’s Contra tab, and if it is empty, apply it there. If the receipt is listed and the invoice is not, part of the money is still unapplied, which is correct for an overpayment.

Common mistakes

The mistakes in the bank charges, the contra and FINAL are on Apply the receipt and finalise it. These belong to the rest of the task:

Related documentation