Before you chase a customer for money, check what they actually owe. The Transactions ledger is every invoice, payment, tip, credit, refund and adjustment across your business in one filterable list, and filtered to one customer it becomes their account history.
1 Open Transactions
Go to Transactions from the left menu. You land on the whole-business ledger with four summary tiles across the top:
- Charged, everything you have billed
- Collected, everything you have taken in
- Net balance, the difference
- Tips (owe workers), kept separate on purpose
2 Filter down to one customer
Pick a customer from the customer filter and the ledger becomes their account. You can narrow further by property (useful when one customer has several addresses) and by date range, and you can filter to a single transaction type.
The types are invoice, payment, tip, credit, refund and adjustment.
You can also reach the same view from the customer’s own detail page, on their Transactions tab. Old bookmarks to the standalone credit ledger redirect there automatically, so nothing you saved is broken.
3 Read the columns
The table gives you Date, Type, Description, Reference, Charge, Payment and Balance.
Charge and Payment are separate columns rather than one signed number, which makes it obvious at a glance whether a row added to what they owe or paid it down. Reference ties the row back to the invoice or payment it came from.
Balance is the running balance after that row, which is the number to trust. Reading down the Balance column tells you the story of the account in order rather than making you add things up.
4 What “CR” means
When a balance is shown with CR after it, the customer is in credit: you are holding money of theirs rather than being owed money. That happens after an overpayment, a prepayment, or a credit you issued.
This matters when you are chasing. A customer showing a balance with CR does not owe you anything, and calling them for payment is the kind of mistake that costs goodwill. Check for CR before you pick up the phone.
You do not have to open the ledger to see it. The customer list and the customer’s detail page show $70.00 credit (or whatever they hold) when the customer owes nothing and has credit on account. They used to show $0.00, which looked the same as a customer who was simply paid up. A customer who owes money and also holds credit shows both, such as $45.00 owed, $70.00 credit. Credit pays new invoices, not ones that are already open, so both can be true at once. The list and the detail page use the same rule, so they never disagree.
When credit pays an invoice, the invoice’s payments list says Paid by credit and names the payment the credit came from, dated the day the credit was applied.
You do not have to spend a credit by hand. The next time you raise an invoice for that customer, their available credit is drawn against it automatically, oldest credit first, and the invoice shows up already reduced or already covered. A prepayment in March quietly pays for April’s cuts without anyone remembering to go and apply it.
Two things worth knowing about that:
- Account credit is credit you add yourself, for a goodwill gesture or an overpayment you are keeping. The owner or an admin adds it from an invoice: open Issue credit and choose Add account credit. It is applied to that customer’s next invoices, not to ones already open, and it shows on invoices, statements and the year-end export. It is not applied while QuickBooks is connected. Leave Email the customer about the credit ticked and they get an email saying how much credit they have.
- A credit on one invoice lowers what that invoice owes instead. Open the invoice, click Issue credit and choose Reduce this invoice. It works on an invoice with no payments yet, and it is off while QuickBooks or Xero is connected, because the sync sends line items only; record that one in your accounting software instead. The credit comes off after tax, the invoice PDF is redone with a Credit line showing your reason, and Email the customer the updated invoice (ticked by default) sends them the new invoice with the PDF attached. A customer with no email address, or who opted out of invoice emails, is not emailed, and ClippingCash tells you why.
- It only ever draws on available credit. Money you have already refunded to the customer cannot be spent again, even though the original payment is still sitting there in the list.
- It draws against what is still owed, not the invoice total, so an invoice the customer has part-paid by other means does not get over-applied and end up overpaid.
5 Tips are not revenue
Tips show as their own rows and never change an invoice balance. A tip is money you are holding for the crew member who earned it, not income against the job.
That is why Tips (owe workers) is its own summary tile rather than being folded into Collected. If you treat tips as revenue you will both overstate your income and underpay your crew. The ledger keeps them apart so you do not have to remember to.