Getting paid

You’ll need: Transactions, Orders, Invoices, Cash accounts — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

Money arriving is recorded as a transaction. What that money settles depends on whether an invoice exists yet — which, for physical goods, it usually does not.

Two things a payment can settle

An invoice payment settles a document that already says what is owed. This is what happens for memberships, tickets and credits, and for anything invoiced up front.

A customer advance is money taken against an order before its invoice exists. It is the default path for physical goods, for the reason in lesson 1: the order can still change, so the invoice waits.

An advance is not revenue yet. It is money you are holding that you owe the customer either goods or a refund — a liability, until the invoice turns it into a sale. That distinction is why it is recorded as its own kind of movement rather than as an ordinary payment; treating it as revenue at the moment cash arrives would count the same sale twice when the invoice is finally raised.

An advance belongs to one order

Not to the customer. To the specific order it was paid for.

A customer-level pot would be more flexible, and it would have to answer “which of these six orders did this 40,000 pay for?” — a question no automatic rule answers correctly and every accountant eventually asks. Held per order, the answer is structural.

The cost is worth knowing: an advance cannot be moved to a different order. A customer who cancels and re-orders gets a refund and pays again.

What happens when the invoice appears

   payment      ->  advance held against the order   (liability)
   fulfilment   ->  goods go out, order may change
   invoice      ->  advance applied to it            (liability -> receivable)
                    NO second payment, no second banking

Applying the advance settles the invoice without moving cash again — the cash was banked the day it arrived. If you are watching a customer’s account, this is why an invoice can appear already paid without anybody recording a payment against it.

If the order shrank below what they paid, or was cancelled, the difference goes back as a refund — the one movement here that actually takes 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 rather than a total floating free of any actual place money sits.

Part payments and what is still owed

Record what actually arrived. The remaining balance is what it is.

Resist adjusting an invoice down to match a short payment. The invoice says what was owed, the payment says what came in, and the gap between them is the thing you need to see. An invoice edited to match its payment can never be chased.

Paying online

Where a payment gateway is configured, customers pay from a link and the money lands against the right thing automatically — the invoice if one exists, the order as an advance if not. One exception worth knowing: an invoice reached directly by its own link is always paid as an invoice, because whoever issued it decided the document was final.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, pay for a physical order from the public side and then look at the order — the money is held against it, with no invoice yet. Raise the invoice and watch the advance apply itself without a second payment.