Recording payments
Charges, payments, balances, refunds, and what happens with more than one currency.
Every charge and every payment is a transaction against a patient, and the difference between them is that patient's balance. It shows on their card, so whoever is standing in front of them can see it without opening a separate ledger.
The shape of it
- A charge is raised when work is done or agreed.
- A payment is recorded when money arrives, in whatever currency it arrived in.
- The balance is what is left. Positive means they owe you; negative means you owe them.
More than one currency
Transactions record the currency and, where relevant, the exchange rate at the moment they are written.
A rate that moves next month does not rewrite what you took today. This is why a report from March still says what it said in March — and why you should not "fix" a historical rate when the market moves.
Refunds
Record a refund as its own transaction rather than deleting the original payment. What you want at the end of the year is a record of what happened, and "money came in and then went back out" is what happened.
Deleting the original makes the balance right and the history wrong. Only one of those gets audited.
Sensitive fields
Payment details that ought not to be on a shared screen sit behind the sensitive finance permission module, separate from ordinary finance. A role can take payments without being able to read them all back.
Common questions
- Can I take payment through the product?
- Not today — transactions are a record of money that moved, not a way to move it. Payment collection is on the list.
- A patient overpaid.
- Leave the negative balance and settle it against their next visit, or record a refund. Both are honest; a deleted transaction is not.