We’ve talked about payments before, but this week I wanted to go a little more in depth. The way payments are handled and applied by a billing system is important, things need to be accounted for.
Some popular billing systems do really strange things, like..
- Create a new invoice when someone attempts to pay multiple open invoices for the sum of those invoices, and when that invoice is paid mark the others as paid.
- Allow staff to mark an invoice as paid without recording a transaction.
Simply put, this leads to an accounting nightmare. If an invoice is marked paid, surely there should be a history of how and when that invoice was paid, right? Absolutely! Blesta handles this well in v3, but that’s not a new feature!.. We’ve been accounting for everything since the beginning.
Good billing software will let you pay a single invoice with multiple payments, and pay multiple invoices with a single payment. It should keep track of how much of which payments were applied to which invoices.
In this screenshot you can see that 2 payments were made to a single invoice, and the invoice still isn’t paid in full yet. (Click image to see full size)
It all comes down to this: We want to do things right, and we spend the extra time to do it right when others don’t. It’s this way with everything we do. We engage every feature with purpose and forethought. It’s about creating great software whether we sell a thousand copies or a million copies.