Skimmer Billing - How to Manage Account Credits

To learn how to manage account credits with Skimmer Billing, see the video below. Or, if you prefer, scroll past the video to view our step-by-step text instructions.

Step-by-step instructions . . .

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If you want to collect a payment and apply it to the customer’s account itself rather than directly to an invoice, you can do that in Skimmer with Account Credits. This creates a credit balance for that customer, which can then be applied to existing or future invoices.

Why might you want to do this? Some customers want to pay upfront for multiple months of service. Others may have multiple outstanding invoices, and may want to submit a single lump payment for you to apply to those invoices. There are various possible reasons. The end result is the ability to accept payments separately from an invoice and then have flexibility in how those funds are applied to what the customer owes or will owe for service. We’re going to show you how to do this from the customer profile and the Payments screen.

First, on the customer profile, note the Account Overview box, as these numbers are relevant to credits. Account Receivable shows everything the customer owes you, everything you’ve invoiced that is unpaid. Credit Balance shows any money currently applied directly to customer’s account and not an invoice. Net Balance shows the difference between those two numbers. You’ll see these numbers change as invoices are paid and credits are added and subtracted.

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Now, here’s how to add a payment to the customer account, at any time, from their profile screen.

In the Billing History box, click Add Payment. Add Payment box appears, and it defaults to the customer whose profile we’re on. Click to open the Select Destination box. In the dropdown list, you can choose to apply this payment to specific invoice numbers or to an Account Credit. We want to apply this payment directly to customer account, not an existing invoice, so we’ll choose Account Credit.

Fill in the amount, adjust the payment date if necessary, and choose the payment method. The method can be physical like cash or check, or an electronic online payment. For demonstration we’ll choose Check, and in the memo we’ll say, “Payment for upcoming invoices.”

Click Save, and now the Credit Balance field has updated to reflect the funds we just added to the customer’s account.

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You can also apply Account Credits from the Payments screen. Under Billing, click Payments, and on that screen click Add Payment in the top right corner.

Note that the exact same box appears as what we saw on the customer profile. The key difference is, because we’re not on a customer’s profile, Skimmer doesn’t know yet which customer you want to apply this to. So you’ll click the first dropdown and choose the customer. Once you do that, everything else works exactly the same. We’ll go through the same process again to add another Check payment.

Once the payment is saved, you can see that it’s been successfully added to the Payments screen. Next, we’ll go back to the customer’s profile, and you can see the Credit Balance has updated with the second payment we just added.

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At this point, this money has been collected as a credit to customer account. It has not been applied to anything yet. Here’s how to apply some of this credit to an existing invoice.

Under Billing History, find the overdue invoice and click the invoice number. That will open the full view of the invoice. Then, in the Payments box, click Add. Note the customer and the invoice number have auto-populated, and you can edit the payment amount and date if necessary. The amount defaults to the full amount owed on this invoice.

But the key box we’re focused on is Method. Click to open and you’ll see various payment methods, including Applied Credit. Choose this option to apply the existing account credit to this invoice. The customer has already given us the payments to bank up this credit, and now we’re going to apply that money. Keep in mind that when you choose to apply an account credit, the amount cannot exceed how much actual credit there is. So if the customer only had a credit of $10, the amount could not go higher than $10. If you enter a higher number, the amount will error and the payment won’t complete.

Once parameters are set, click Add Payment. Now the Payments box shows what we just did as a successful payment, and the balance on this invoice has updated.

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Returning to their profile, because we just manually applied some of this customer’s Account Credit to an outstanding invoice, their Credit Balance has also updated. If there are multiple outstanding invoices, you can do this with as many of them as you need, as long as there’s still credit to apply.

What happens when there’s an account credit, and you create a new invoice? We’ll demonstrate that now. First, note that the customer still has an account credit.

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Then go to the Invoices screen and click Create Invoice.

On the creation screen, choose the customer, create a line item, give it a name and a price, then save. Now, if we just Save this invoice, nothing else will happen. But if we choose to Save and Send, or Save and Mark as Sent, as soon as this invoice has sent it will automatically pull a payment from the customer’s available credit.

We’ll choose Save and Mark as Sent. Note the pop-up box, which informs you that an existing credit has just been applied to pay this invoice – in whole if there’s enough credit, or in part if there isn’t.

So, when there’s available Account Credit, the next time a new invoice is created for this customer and either sent or marked as sent, Skimmer will automatically apply the credit as a payment to that invoice. This will happen for every new invoice as long as the customer has credit.

Skimmer will do also do this automatically for customers in bulk. So if you use the Invoice Generator to create and send invoices to multiple customers, for any of those customers who currently have an Account Credit, Skimmer will apply that credit to the generated invoice as soon as it’s sent or marked as sent.

And that’s a basic overview of Account Credits.