Requesting single payment for multiple invoices

How-to
1

OK, a variation on the old split-payments question…

I sell cycle tours. Normally when someone books for a tour I generate an invoice for a deposit payment, email it to them, and they pay it - sometimes by bank transfer, sometimes via the Stripe integration. I will hold their place on the tour for up to two weeks without payment, so the due date on the deposit invoice is always ‘two weeks from today’.

I use project tags to help me analyse the profitability of each tour and to monitor outstanding payments for a given tour, and so that my independent trustee has a clear overview of who’s paid what for which tour. So each invoice has a project tag tying it to the right tour. (To meet government regs, there is a trust fund that contains enough money for the trustee to reimburse customers should my company become insolvent before they get their tours.)

Now, I have a client who’s booked for three tours and to make things simple for him I’d like to send him one invoice for all three deposits so that he just has to make one payment. However I can’t allocate specific project codes to individual items on a single invoice.

So the most obvious way I can think of to do this is…

  1. Create separate invoices for each deposit, mark them as sent but don’t send them to the client.
  2. Create a new invoice for the full amount (call it the combined deposits invoice).
  3. Send him the combined deposits invoice.
  4. He pays it via the Stripe link, so the payment gets automatically allocated to the combined deposits invoice.
  5. I delete the combined deposits invoice, but not the associated payment (I think that’s possible?).
  6. I allocate the payment to his account as a ‘prepayment held on account’.
  7. I use that prepayment on account to pay off each of the individual deposit invoices.

Would that work? Have I missed an easier way? I don’t entirely like it because until I do steps 5-7 it looks in the accounts as if he owes me twice as much as he really does.

I think this also works if he pays via bank transfer - in fact it should be easier for me as the payment and the combined invoice don’t automatically get matched up.

Thanks

2

Hello @AndyK

Could you not create the 3 invoices (that way you can use the project functionality) and send them a statement which shows the outstanding balance.

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When they pay the £360 as per the example, use the option to pay down multiple invoices on their account?

3

Ah, not looked at statements. So does the statement give them a payment link that enables them to pay the full amount?

4

Answering my own question, I’ve just tried with a dummy client and yes, it does. Excellent. Much neater solution. Thanks.

It’s a small annoyance that the statement footer template is limited to 1000 characters, as that’s not enough to include all the info about alternative ways to pay and payment protection that appears on my invoices, but I’ll work around it.

5

Can’t you put any additional information in a PDF and have it auto attach (I know it works for invoices)… We use it toprovide Statutory Notices which have to be sent with payment demands

6

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