Record a payment you received

This is for money that arrives outside the app — cash at the office, a bank transfer, a POS terminal, a cheque. Payments parents make in the app record themselves and need nothing from you.

Only bursars and proprietors can record payments. A principal can see every invoice and payment and cannot enter one.

The Record payment button is still visible to them, and the refusal only arrives on save — and it names the wrong permission when it does. If you are a principal and a payment will not save, that is why; ask your bursar.

Recording it

1. Go to Fees, find the invoice, and choose Record payment — from the row’s actions menu, from the invoice itself, or from the Payments tab.
2. Enter the amount, pick the method, and put the receipt or transfer reference in Reference.
3. Set Paid at to when the money actually arrived, not when you are typing.
4. Save.

The balance updates immediately, and the invoice moves to Partially paid or Paid on its own.

Use the real method

The method is not cosmetic. Cash and everything-else are booked differently in the records, and the day’s cash listing only counts payments recorded as Cash. A POS payment entered as cash will make your end-of-day cash count come up short against the records, and finding it later means opening payments one by one. (That listing is not yet a screen — it is produced by support on request.)

If the amount is more than the balance

The app refuses it:

Amount exceeds the invoice balance. Reduce the payment or refund the excess separately.

It does not quietly cap the payment at the balance, and it does not create a credit. An invoice for ₦50,000 with ₦48,000 already paid will not accept ₦5,000.

What to do depends on why there is extra money:

• The parent paid for more than this invoice — record the part that belongs to this invoice, then record the rest against the other invoice. If the other invoice does not exist yet, issue it first.
• The parent genuinely overpaid — record the amount that fits, and handle the excess separately. Note that “refund the excess” in the message only works for online payments; for cash, see Refund or reverse a payment.
• You typed it wrong — just correct it before saving.

Getting it wrong

The parent is told straight away

Saving a payment sends the student’s guardians an SMS receipt with the amount and the new balance. Most parents have it within seconds — before you have a chance to notice a mistake.

Not all of them, though. A parent who has switched receipts off, who is inside their school’s quiet hours, or who has no phone number on file gets nothing, and it is never sent later. So do not treat the receipt as proof a parent knows.

Reversing it sends them nothing. There is no correction message. So if you key the wrong amount, or put a payment against the wrong child’s invoice, the first step is to phone the parent — the reversal tidies the records, and otherwise only you will know it happened.

This also means splitting one payment across two invoices sends two receipts — worth a word to the parent so the second one is not alarming, and worth knowing that each one is an SMS your school pays for.

A saved payment cannot be edited or deleted. Not the amount, not the method, not the date, not the invoice it sits on. Payments are a permanent record.

To correct one, you reverse it and record it again — and a reversal needs a second person to approve it. See Refund or reverse a payment.

The same rule reaches invoices. An invoice with any money on it cannot be voided; the app says invoice has payments — refund flow required. Reverse the payment first, then void.

Voiding an unpaid invoice asks Void this invoice? This cannot be undone. and means it — a voided invoice never re-opens.

What the Payments tab does not tell you

Two things worth knowing so you do not draw the wrong conclusion from that screen.

• It does not show payment status. A payment that has since been reversed still appears with its full amount and no marker. Open the invoice itself to see a payment’s real status — that view does show it, and the two screens will disagree. To check many at once, use Export on the Payments tab: the spreadsheet has a Status column that the screen does not.
• It does not show who recorded a payment. That is captured and kept, but no fees screen displays it. It is in Audit log (under Admin), which a proprietor, principal or IT admin can open — bursars cannot. Look for payment.recorded; it is not in the filter dropdown, so filter by the student or scan the day.

If you get a reconciliation alert

You may receive a notification like:

Payment reconciliation: 2 issues need review. The latest payment reconciliation flagged: 1 unrecorded settlement(s)… Review in the admin Fees console — no money has been moved automatically.

There is no reconciliation screen in the Fees console, so that instruction cannot be followed. This is a known limitation — quote EP-387 to support.

The alert itself is real and worth acting on. The most serious kind, unrecorded settlement, means the payment provider says a parent’s payment succeeded and there is no record of it here — a parent has paid and the school cannot see it. Until the screen exists, contact support with the alert, and:

Do not credit the invoice by hand to make the alert go away

The reconciliation job never moves money on purpose, so that a person decides. Recording a payment by hand to match a settlement you cannot see risks crediting money twice — and the second credit is much harder to find later than the missing one. Get the transaction confirmed first.