Things to keep in mind

By default, every platform account follows the model of one payment for one invoice with matching amounts. This is a straight forward and easy to understand process that will ensure each invoice is its own self-contained transaction between yourselves and your customers.

Enabling the various options described in How it works means that the behaviour of Billingbooth changes, and with it potential problems may arise if this is not taken into account.

WARNING

If you are not planning on using the platform to reconcile your invoices, by settling them on a regular basis manually or automatically through payment providers then you should not enable customer balance options as this will lead to payments being wrong in the future due to unsettled invoices.

Existing platform customers

If you are an existing customer that has, up to now, been using the previous one payment for one invoice model, you should first use the new Reports -> Customer Balances report to review the existing balances of your customers, and make sure that there aren't any erroneous entries in place. If any customer balances don't look correct, you will need to go to their Balance page and make the necessary adjustments to ensure they're up-to-date.

We recommend that if you're switching from the old model to using customer balances entirely you initially enable Invoices use Previous Balance for a couple of months so that any balances that may be wrong are spotted by your customers, but no incorrect payments are taken. Once you're comfortable that every customer's balance is correct, you should then be able to turn on Payments use Previous Balance.

New platform customers

If you are a brand new customer to the platform and are looking to enable customer balances from your very first billing run then please ensure you've read How it works so you understand the concepts and behaviour as a result of turning on the relevant options.