Incoming Payments
BestInvoicing offers three ways to follow up your incoming payments (= payments by your customers):
Manual payment follow-up
Manual upload of digital bank statements
Automated connection with your bank via Ponto
Manual Payment Follow-Up
To manually mark your invoice as 'paid', click the button 'Change status to paid' in the summary of your invoice.
However, in order to optimally use the functionalities of BestInvoicing, it is advised to manually add more information about the actual payment. To do so, click the blue 'Action' button. Then select 'Create payment manually' from the drop down menu.
A pop-up window will open to enter the payment information:
Payment account: this can be your company's bank account or, for example, your cash register. You indicate how the payment was made.
Date: indicate when the payments was received.
Counterparty name: preset to name invoiced, can be overwritten.
Notice: preset to invoice serial number, can be overwritten.
Amount: the amount you received in this transaction. Maybe the customer only paid 1/2 of the invoiced amount today, or the payment is incomplete.
Click 'Create Payment' to enter your data. Example of payment entered::
Entering the different payment accounts for your company only has to be done once. Read here how to do it.
Manual Upload of Digital Bank Statements
There are a number of payment file types that can be uploaded to BestInvoicing.
Navigate to 'Payments' in the menu to the left
Click the blue button 'Actions', then select 'Import Payment File'
Select the file type of the file you which to upload
The following file types can be uploaded:
MT940
An MT940 file is a digital printout of the bank transactions on your account (electronic bank account statement). An MT940 file includes data such as the transaction amount, description and account number of the counterparty.
Mastercard or Visa Statement
It is often also possible to export an overview of your web banking transactions, paid with Mastercard or Visa as a PDF file. You can manually upload these files into BestInvoicing to link the individual transactions to your payments.
Please note that BestInvoicing cannot identify which payments you may have already uploaded and which you have not. You need to keep a close eye on this yourself to avoid payments ending up in BestInvoicing twice.
As soon as you have uploaded a payment file, the system will create and link a payment account in BestInvoicing. Per payment account you will see an overview of amounts and their status.
In your overview of created invoices, a match will now immediately be made between the payments and the invoice status (open vs. paid). The open invoices will automatically be marked as 'paid' based on the imported bank details.
In some cases, however, the payment received cannot be immediately matched to an invoice. These unassigned payments end up in the processing lists.
Automated Connection with Your Bank via Ponto
Ponto is a tool to share your bank transactions with another software. By connecting your Ponto account to BestInvoicing, you can automatically share your transaction data and your bank's payment options with BestInvoicing.
When BestInvoicing is linked to Ponto, all your bank transactions and the balance of your linked bank accounts can be consulted. With this data BestInvoicing can then automatically mark invoices as paid, provide a complete overview of all your bank accounts, ...
To use this connection in BestInvoicing you need to perform three actions yourself:
create a Ponto account;
add your bank accounts to Ponto;
activate the Ponto connection in BestInvoicing
BestInvoicing takes care of the technical connection between BestInvoicing and Ponto. For all questions regarding activation, connection with your bank, ... You can contact Ponto. If you encounter technical problems please contact support@bestinvoicing.com.
Create account with Ponto
Through Ponto's website you can easily create an account for your company. You will also be able to choose between the different subscription formulas. If you only want to retrieve transactions, 'Account Information' suffices. If you also want to pay your purchases from within BestInvoicing, also select 'Payment Initiation'.
Activating the Ponto Connection
To activate the Ponto connection:
Go to 'Apps and Integrations', using your email address at the top right of the screen.
You will find the Ponto app under the apps for 'Payments'. Click the green 'Activate' button.
3. Once activated you can start connecting your Ponto account via the yellow 'Configure' button. You will be asked to connect your Ponto account and be redirected to the Ponto environment. There you must give BestInvoicing permission to receive your Ponto data.
4. After you have registered via Ponto, you will see an overview of your account(s) that are transmitting data through Ponto, based on your IBAN number.
An additional line will now appear in the overview of your payments (left menu): Ponto. When you click 'View' you can see the list of transactions that have been pulled in via your Ponto connection.
Ponto collects your transactions hourly and forwards them to BestInvoicing. This happens more or less in real time. When setting up the account and connecting to Ponto, Ponto is only going to retrieve the last 10 transactions. Some accounts may have had thousands of transactions before the connection was set up, so BestInvoicing is not going to retroactively retrieve them all.
Processing Lists
BestInvoicing checks the payments for information on, among other things, invoiced amount, invoice number, ... But in some cases unfortunately no match can be found (e.g. if the invoice amount was not paid in full or a wrong reference was mentioned). These unmatched payments are included in the 'Payments' processing list. You will find it at the top right of the screen, behind the three cogwheels.
Depending on your activated Apps and Integrations, you will see more or less processing lists here. There is for example a separate processing list for Payments, for Products with low stock or for Incoming purchase documents.
To link a transaction to a document (invoice, cash register ticket, ...) click the blue button 'Process'. A new window opens.
If e.g. you click 'Link to Invoice', the invoice list will open, and you can select the outstanding invoice and 'Link' via the blue button.
The linked transaction is now processed and disappears from the processing list.
The processing list lists all transactions that cannot be linked, based on the bank statements provided (manually or via Ponto). Therefore this list may include other types of transactions, such as an internal transfer from one company account to another, or bank charges. To remove these types of costs from the list, you can simply click the grey 'Ignore' button.
Suppose that based on the processing list an invoice payment turned out to be only partially paid, you can e.g. create a payment reminder for the remaining outstanding amount. You can read how to do that in the next section.
Payment Reminders
Adding a Manual Payment Reminder
It is possible to create a reminder for an outstanding invoice. To set one up, go to 'Reminders' on the left of your invoice summary. Click the green button 'Create Reminder'.
A default message is used to urge your customer to pay.
You can customize this message for your entire organisation. Read here how to set it up.
Above the text field you will be asked for 'New term for reminder'. The value in this field will be used in the text as the value of the tag '%term%: "We request that you transfer the amount due to our bank account %iban% as soon as possible, but no later than within the %term% days, mentioning the invoice number."
Read more about using tags in BestInvoicing here.
Below the text field it is possible to include additional costs:
Dunning costs: costs that effectively cover the formatting and sending of the reminder.
Interest rate: on an annual basis, must fall within legally reasonable provisions.
Minimum interest: value to be determined freely (amount, no percentage).
Damage compensation percentage: to be interpreted on the entire invoice amount including VAT.
Minimum compensation: value to be determined (amount, no percentage).
An example:
Total invoice amount incl. VAT | $ 1000 |
Dunning costs | $ 10 |
Interest rate | 12% |
Minimum interest | $ 5 |
Damage compensation percentage | 10% |
Minimum compensation | $ 3 |
The result for a reminder of an unpaid invoice after 30 days:
Total invoice amount incl. VAT | $ 1000 |
Dunning costs | $ 10 |
Interest (at 30 days) | $ 9.86 |
Damage compensation | $ 100 |
Also describe the additional costs mentioned above in your General Terms and Conditions. Read how to do that here.
Click 'Add' to save the reminder.
The reminder is created and can now be sent by email or printed out.
Set Automatic Payment Reminders
You can immediately set up one or more automatic payment reminders for all your payments, at company level. Read all about it in the tutorial 'Automatic Payment Reminders'.
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