Ambrook makes managing bills & invoices easy by letting you create, send, and make or receive payments via Ambrook Wallet. But for some bills and invoice, payments might be happening via checks or cash transactions on your other connected accounts. To account for these types of payments Ambrook lets you record payments on your bills and invoices, which are then cleared when payments actually post to your bank account. This article will give you a breakdown of how to use these features Ambrook and also some situations where they might apply to your operation.
Recording a Payment
To record a payment in Ambrook you:
Open the details of a Bill or Invoice
Click the “+” button next to “Match Payment”
Select the type of payment you want to record.
Ambrook supports recording multiple types of payments including:
Transactions
Checks
Expected Payments
Each of these types requires you to enter an amount for the payment as well as a bit of additional information before being recorded to your Ledger:
Transactions: Account and date that you want to apply the payment
Checks: Date and the check number
Internal Transfers: Date, enterprise source and enterprise destination
Expected Payments: Date
Recording a payment on a Bill or Invoice will mark it as paid, reducing your Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable. In the case of checks and expected payments, these will be recorded as balances on system accounts [1] that Ambrook generates for you:
Check payments on bills are recorded to Outstanding Checks
Check payments in invoices are recorded to Undeposited Checks
Expected payments on bills are recorded to Expected Bill Payments
Expected payments on invoices are recorded to Expected Invoice Payments
Clearing a Payment
Recording a check or expected payment on either a bill or an invoice indicates that you expect payment to be deposited to your Ledger in the future. When that happens, there will be a transaction on your Ledger that represents the payment, either in the exact amount or sometimes as part of a larger deposit amount in the case of check bundles.
“Clearing” a payment is the process of linking your recorded check payment to the posted withdrawal or deposit. Doing this will reduce the balance of your Undeposited Checks or Outstanding Checks account and link the payment in your ledger to the invoice or bill you recorded the check on.
To clear a recorded check payment:
Go to the details screen of the bill or invoice
Select the “Clear” button next to the payment.
Locate the transaction on your Ledger in the "Clear Check" or "Clear Payment" screen (pictured below)
Click "Done" to complete the clearing process.
Clearing a payment replace it with the transaction posted to your Ledger and associate that transaction with the bill or invoice. The transaction will also inherit the tags from the bill or invoice.
Workflow Example
Say you have an invoice in Ambrook that is past due, but your customer recently visited the farm and handed you a check. You won’t have a chance to make it to the bank in the next week or two, but you want to make sure you can mark the invoice as paid. Otherwise your AR manager might reach out to your customer asking them for payment even though you already have the check.
In this case, you would record the check you were handed as a payment on the invoice, noting the date you received the check as well as the check number. When you later deposit that check in your bank (or using Ambrook's mobile deposit) and you see it on your Ledger, you will return to the invoice and go through the clearing process.
Notes
[1] Several of the accounts referenced above are Ambrook System Accounts, meaning their balances are updated automatically when you take actions like recording transactions and clearing payments. For more information on system accounts read here.