#Getting paid

An invoice is only half the story; this chapter is the other half. Every way money comes in — a bank transfer you record, an advance received before the work, a card payment the customer makes from a link — ends up in the same place: the invoice's Payments tab, the settlement bar beside TRACE, and a journal entry you can open.

#The Payments tab

Open any posted invoice and click Payments next to Lines. The strip at the top tells the invoice's money story in one line — Invoice · less advances · Billed · Paid · Open — and under it every settlement as a row: the payment number, date, method, which account the money went into, the amount, and the journal entry.

Every number is a door. Click a payment to open it in the Payments register; click an advance or a credit note to open that document; click the entry to open the ledger. Voucher on any payment prints a receipt voucher you can hand to the customer.

#Recording a payment you received

You received a transfer, cash or a cheque and want the invoice to reflect it.

1. Open the invoice → Record Payment (the filled-circle button in the header, or the same button on the Payments tab).
2. Enter the amount (part payments are fine, never more than the invoice still owes), the date the money arrived (never before the invoice's own date), the method (bank transfer, cash, cheque, card, other), the account it went into — one of the bank or cash accounts under Banking, or leave it on the company's default bank — and a reference — the bank's transaction reference or cheque number is ideal.
3. Save. The invoice moves to Partial or Paid, the settlement bar fills, and the payment appears in the tab with its journal entry.

Rounded to the currency. The amount is rounded to its currency's decimals before anything is booked, on a computer and on the phone, for bills too: ¥42,538.99 on a yen invoice of ¥42,539 pays it, and it reads Paid. An amount that rounds to nothing is refused: A payment of JPY 0.4 rounds to nothing: amounts in JPY have no decimals. Enter at least JPY 1.

An invoice in another currency. The amount is in the invoice's currency. Under it the window shows the rate the payment is booked at — the newest rate on file on or before the payment date, or the invoice's own when there is none — and what it comes to in your currency. When that rate is older than the invoice, it says so: add the day's rate first, or, when the bank keeps another currency, check the next field. That field, Amount received, appears when the bank's currency isn't the invoice's (an AED bank receiving euros): enter what actually landed. It decides the exchange gain or loss. If a revaluation is already in the books on or after the payment date, the window says to post it again afterwards, or the month's gain counts twice.

Recording, voiding and refunding money needs the right to post invoices, or Bank Reconciliation.

Money that came before the invoice. A payment, a receipt run or a refund can't be dated before the document it settles: a payment can't be dated before its invoice. Money received earlier is a deposit — record it under Books → Payments → Advance / deposit, then apply it to the invoice once it exists. Two payments recorded at the same moment on one invoice both count, and nobody can unpost the invoice while a payment is being recorded on it.

A credit note is money you owe the customer, so it is never "collected": New payment, receipt runs and Apply advance list invoices only, and the server refuses a payment received for a credit note (Credit note … is money you owe the customer). Apply the credit note to an invoice, or refund it. Each invoice in a receipt run takes what it still owes, after credit notes and any discount after tax.

Received one payment against several invoices? Record it from Books → Payments register, where a single payment can be allocated across many invoices, with any remainder kept on account.

#Payments that arrive on the bank statement

If you work from the bank statement — importing lines or typing them — you usually don't need to record payments by hand at all. In Books → Bank Reconciliation, each statement line has a Reconcile button: pick the customer's invoice and Tamra records the payment, matches the line, and reconciles it in one step. See Money in the bank for the whole flow.

#Advances — money before the invoice

Some customers pay a deposit before the work starts. In the UAE an advance is itself a tax invoice, with VAT due when the money is received, so Tamra treats it that way:

1. When the deposit lands on the bank statement, use Reconcile → New advance from [customer]. Tamra creates an ADV document, records the VAT, and matches the line. Without a statement line, such as a deposit paid in cash, use Books → Payments → Advance / deposit → Take a deposit: it asks what the money is. An Advance for goods or services (the default) issues the same ADV with its VAT and records the payment; a Refundable security deposit (keys, equipment, a lease) carries no VAT and waits in Customer Advances.
2. When you raise the real invoice, the Apply Advance button on the draft shows a count of advances waiting. Apply one and a Less: advance line is added, so the invoice bills only the balance and the VAT nets correctly across the two documents.
3. The final invoice's PDF shows the advance, the balance due, and a reference to the advance invoice — what the tax authority expects to see.

The settlement bar counts an applied advance as money already in, and the Payments tab lists it as a row pointing at its journal entry.

Set against the wrong invoice? A customer's advance or deposit applied to a posted invoice from Books → Payments → Advance / deposit has Remove under it on that invoice's Payments tab: the entry that used it is reversed on its own date, the invoice is open again for that amount, and the advance is free to use on another invoice or to refund. It needs the right to post invoices; one used on or before the Books Lock Date stays.

A customer's credit on account brought in with Move to Tamra (a negative opening balance) is a receipt on account: Books → Payments lists it with method Other and the reference Opening credit, and Advance / deposit → Apply existing uses it on the customer's invoices, as any deposit: Remove on the invoice's Payments tab takes it off again, and force unposting the invoice frees it. A vendor's debit balance is a payment on account the same way, used with a bill's Apply prepayment and taken off with Remove on the bill's Payments tab. It moved no money in Tamra, so the register's Money in and Money out leave it out and count it as On account. Voiding it removes it with its opening entry; to keep a record, reverse that entry in Journal Entries instead (see The books).

#Letting customers pay by card

Tamra can put a Pay online link on any posted invoice. The customer opens it and pays by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay on a secure hosted page; the invoice turns paid by itself within seconds.

#Enrolling your company (once)

Settings → Integrations → Online payments. The card walks you through it with a live checklist:

1. Set up — readies the two ledger accounts card money needs: Gateway Clearing (where it lands, added if your chart has none) and your chart's own bank charges account for the gateway's fee — Bank Charges & Fees (6970) in the standard chart. Only when the chart has no bank charges account is Bank Charges added. Only people in the company can set up or switch on its card payments.
2. Switch on — allows payment links on this company's invoices.
3. Connect your Stripe — opens Stripe's secure enrolment. Have to hand your trade licence or registration number, the company bank account (IBAN) for payouts, the ID of an owner or director, and a phone for a verification code. About ten minutes. Card details never pass through Tamra.
4. Back in Tamra the card reads Connected. Until then it tells you what is still needed; press Continue setup to pick up where you left off.

#Sending a link

On a posted, unpaid invoice: Send ▾ → Payment link…, or open the Payments tab. Press Create link, then Copy link to paste it into a message, or Open to see the page your customer will see. The link is for the invoice's open amount. A card checkout stays open for 24 hours — the card gateway's own limit — so the Payments tab shows until when the link works, and once it has closed it asks you to create a fresh one. One live link per invoice — creating a new one retires the old.

When the invoice changes after the link went out — part-paid another way, credited, unposted — the link is set to close: the customer's portal stops offering it, and the next link made for the company closes the old checkout at Stripe, so the old amount can't be paid. A link follows the amount due to the fils: a few fils added are enough to close it, so a new link asks the right amount, and a change that leaves what it asks right keeps it open. A link keeps the customer and the invoice number even if the draft invoice is later deleted.

Send it on WhatsApp: open the invoice → Send ▾ → WhatsApp to customer (just under Email to customer). Tamra shows the message first — the invoice number, the amount, the due date — with the best link it has: the live payment link if there is one, otherwise the customer's portal link. If your company has connected its WhatsApp number (Setting up a company → WhatsApp), Send from your number sends it with delivery ticks (in Arabic too, for UAE companies), once the customer has agreed; otherwise Open in my WhatsApp opens WhatsApp addressed to the customer's mobile or phone number, and you press send. A local number is dialled with your company's country code — 050 123 4567 becomes +971 50 123 4567 for a UAE company, 923 456 789 becomes +244 923 456 789 in Angola. The same WhatsApp button also sits beside Copy link once a payment link is live.

#What happens when they pay

• The invoice moves to Paid (or Partial if the link covered only part). Press ↻ on the Payments tab if you are watching it happen.
• Money that arrives is always booked, even on a link whose invoice changed: up to what the invoice still owes goes to the invoice, and anything beyond it becomes a customer advance you can apply to their next invoice or refund. The payment is dated the day it was made, in your company's time; one dated before its invoice is kept as a customer advance.
• A payment appears in the tab, into Gateway Clearing, with its journal entry; the customer receives an emailed receipt.
• The gateway's fee is absorbed — the customer pays the invoice amount, and the fee posts automatically, in the currency Stripe charged it in, to your bank charges account (Bank Charges & Fees in the standard chart). A company whose fees were already posted to a separate Bank Charges account keeps using it, so its fees stay in one place.
• Stripe pays the money out to your bank on its usual schedule. When it arrives on your statement, reconcile it as a transfer from Gateway Clearing to your bank — one click in Bank Reconciliation.

Amounts in Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Jordanian and Tunisian dinar and Omani rial go to Stripe in thousandths, and Icelandic krona and Ugandan shilling as whole amounts, the way Stripe reads them (a KWD invoice used to ask for a tenth of its amount).

• A payment for a day with no exchange rate on file is booked at the newest rate before it, else at the invoice's own rate: it is never lost. Money paid in another currency than the link's is held — nothing is booked, the link says so and the people who work on the invoice are told. A payment that arrives on a day the books are locked is recorded on the first open day, and you are told.
• A dinar or rial link asks the open amount rounded up to the hundredth a card can charge (KWD 3.884 open: the link asks 3.890); the extra fils wait as the customer's deposit, to apply to their next invoice.

Refunds and disputes made in your Stripe dashboard are noted on the invoice's payment link and in the bell for the people who work on the invoice; Tamra doesn't book them by itself. Record a refund with a credit note and its refund, and a lost dispute the same way. For these notes to arrive, the Stripe webhook must send the refund and dispute events (charge.refunded, charge.dispute.…).

#Customers who use the portal

A customer with a Customer Portal link doesn't need you to send anything: every open invoice in their portal has Pay … online, which opens a fresh checkout each time they press it. See The Customer Portal.

#Credit notes — when you owe the customer

Charged too much, or goods came back? On the posted invoice, ⋯ → Credit note creates a credit note against it, for the full amount or part. A posted credit note can be applied to an invoice (reducing what's owed, on the date you give, never before either document) or refunded, on or after the note's date — both from the credit note's own header. A note in another currency set against an invoice at another rate takes each off at its own rate; the difference is a realized exchange gain or loss. A refund goes through even when the rate table has no rate for the day: the note's own rate is used. Applied credits show on the invoice's Payments tab like any other settlement. On an invoice with a discount, the note gives back its share of the discount too (see Invoices in depth).

#Undoing a payment

Open the payment (from the Payments tab or the register) and use its header to cancel it. The invoice reopens for that amount, the journal entry is reversed, and the trail stays visible — nothing is deleted. A card payment from a payment link is voided the same way. On an invoice in another currency paid in parts, voiding a payment in the middle and paying again still clears to exactly 0.00. An advance or deposit set against the invoice comes off with Remove instead (above).

#Where to look when something doesn't add up

• The Payments tab — the invoice's own ledger. If the bar says 80% and you expected 100%, the missing row is here.
• Books → Payments register — every payment in the company, filterable by customer, date and method, with allocations, each in its currency's decimals (three for dinars).
• Books → Bank Reconciliation — the bank's view; unmatched lines are money the books don't know about yet.
• Reports → Receivables aging — who owes what, and for how long.