Invoice and payment tracking

Swiftlier provides various tools to help you track and reconcile your invoices and payments, ensuring you can verify:

All invoices that should have been raised have been raised;
All invoices that should have been paid have been paid;
All payments that have been recorded in Swiftlier have actually been received in your bank account.

Invoicing Schedules

Each booking for a Service will have an associated Invoice Schedule. It is this that defines how many invoices are needed for each service the customer has booked, and when they are due to be raised and paid.

You can find more information regarding Invoicing Schedules in this article.

Have all invoices been raised?

Swiftlier will help you to check whether all invoices that should have been raised have actually been raised.

This is useful for spotting cases where a customer has not been invoiced for the Service (or part thereof) that they have bought. If they have not been invoiced, you almost certainly won't have been paid.

You can use the Uninvoiced Orders Export (available from the Finance section of the Exports, function) to download a CSV file containing the following fields:

OrderId
OrderNumber
CustomerIdentifier
CustomerName
OrderValue
AmountNeedingInvoiceToDate - the amount of money that should, according to the Invoice Schedule, have been invoiced for as at the time of running the report.
AmountInvoicedToDate - the value of the invoices that have been raised as at the time of running the report.
ShortFall - the difference between AmountNeedingInvoiceToDate and AmountInvoicedToDate. Essentially, the amount of money that should have been invoiced for this order by now, but hasn't been.
DaysOverdue - the number of whole days that have passed since an unraised invoice should have been raised.
NextInvoiceScheduleDate - the date when the next invoice for that order is due to be raised, according to the order's invoicing schedule.
NextInvoiceAmount - the amount of the next invoice for an order
OnSchedule - a 'TRUE' or 'FALSE' flag that highlights if the invoicing for an order is complying with the order's invoicing schedule or not. Note that Swiftlier's automations will adhere to the schedule, so this should only be FALSE in the case of manual intervention or error.

The Uninvoiced Orders Export will also show you Orders that have invoices that have not yet been raised, but are also not yet due - allowing you to look ahead and see orders for which invoices are due to be issued and sent in the near future. This will allow you to know what's coming up (useful for cashflow awareness and reporting).

Swiftlier will also alert your HQ Staff when a Customer has orders containing an invoice(s) that should have been raised, but has not yet been. This alert will be displayed on the relevant Customer's account screen, so a Staff member must be visiting the account for another reason in order to see it. For proactive management, the Uninvoiced Orders Export mentioned above is most useful.

Manual intervention for invoices

In Swiftlier, Administrators for your account have the ability to manually designate an Order as having been invoiced, without actually raising any invoices on the system.

This is a manual override that should be used in exceptional circumstances. It is not reversible.

To do so, navigate to the Order, then click the three dots next to the order total, followed by the Mark as Invoiced button.

Important - Using Mark as Invoiced will:

instruct Swiftlier to disregard this order from the Uninvoiced Orders Export described above;
disable the invoicing alerts on the Customer's account screen;
stop Swiftlier from automatically raising and sending any further invoices for that Order.

This function could be useful in instances of, for example, data migration - for resolving edge cases of data mismatch between your legacy system and Swiftlier.

Have all invoices been paid?

Swiftlier provides two reports for you to use to track whether payment has been received for all invoices that are due for payment.

Both of these reports are available from the Finances section of the Exports function.

1. Unpaid Invoices

To run the Unpaid Invoices Export, navigate to the Exports function and find the Unpaid Invoices button in the Finances section.

You will be asked to specify a number of days since the invoice was created (or, if different, a number of days overdue).

This allows you to focus your report to your requirements by enabling you to, for example, ignore invoices that are less than 7 days overdue, as you know they will be swept up in a weekly chasing routine.

The report will download as a CSV and will contain details of the unpaid invoices along with associated order and customer information, to facilitate manual follow up.

Note: Where an order contains Unpaid Invoices, you will also be notified of that on the Order summary screen, on the Customer's account.

2. Aged Debtors

To run the Aged Debtors Export, navigate to the Exports function and find the Aged Debtors button in the Finances section.

You have the option of including balanced accounts on your report. The default is that these will not be included. If you tick the box to include them, the report will include all accounts in the system, even if their current balance is £0.00.

The report will download as a CSV, providing you with an account-level (person or organisation) summary of any debt owed (less any credits that have not yet been refunded), and when that debt was incurred, in the following time brackets:

This Month (0-30 days)
Last Month (30-60 days)
2 months ago (60-90 days)
3 months ago (90-120 days)
4 months ago or more (120+ days)

Debt Collections and Write Offs

The two reports described above allow you to observe debt at both an order level (unpaid invoices) and an account level (aged debtors), and to target your debt collection communications according to your preferences.

Should your organisation decide to write off any debt, you can record this against the corresponding Order in Swiftlier.

Allocations of payments to invoices

In most scenarios, Swiftlier will automatically allocate a payment to a specific invoice, allowing that invoice to be considered as having been settled.

However, it is possible to manually allocate payments, and to de-allocate a payment from an invoice in order to move money around within a customer's account. This may be necessary if, for example, a customer paid by bank transfer for one child whose fees are due immediately, but it was erroneously allocated to another child whose fees aren't due until the beginning of next term.

Have all payments recorded in Swiftlier made it to my bank account?

Swiftlier provides you with a Payments report in order to facilitate reconciliation between Swiftlier and your bank account.

The Payments Export is available in the Exports function, in the Finance section.

When you click the Payments button, you will be able to specify a period of time within which you would like a report of payments logged in Swiftlier.

You will then receive a list of all Payments received and Refunds sent within that time period, along with the tender types for each payment or refund.

Where the payment was received via Stripe as a Credit or Debit Card payment, the Payments report will also include the Payout ID in which that Payout was remitted to your bank account. This is also the case for any refunds to cards via Stripe - they will contain the Payout ID from which they were deducted.

Where a payment has been logged in Swiftlier as having been received in Stripe, but a payout has not yet been received, the PayoutID field in the Payment report for that payment will be blank.

You can then reconcile the information in the Payments report to the movement of funds in and out of your bank account. This includes matching bank account information to payments from customers received via other tender types, including Faster Payments/BACS, cash, cheques and others.

You can find more information about Stripe Payouts here

Documentation > Invoice and payment tracking