Taking a payment

MOTION keeps two things apart that most systems muddle: the money that arrived, and what it was for. A customer can hand over N$5,000 against three invoices and a deposit on a fourth, and that is one receipt with four allocations.

Recording it

1. 1Open the customer, or go to Payments and pick them.
2. 2Enter what arrived, by method. A payment split across cash and card is two tenders on one receipt — that split is what gets reconciled later.
3. 3Put a reference on each tender where there is one: the EFT reference, the card's last four.
4. 4Allocate it against the open invoices, or leave it unapplied if they have paid ahead.

Why a balance can never be wrong

What an invoice has been paid is not stored on the invoice. It is worked out, every time you look, from the payments allocated to it. That is why a total and a balance can never drift apart — there is only one number, and the other is derived from it.

Cash change is recorded on the tender, not as a second transaction. If somebody pays N$500 cash on a N$430 invoice, the receipt records N$500 in and N$70 out, and the cash book shows what actually moved.