Keep Card and Offline Payments Reconciled

Real clients pay the messy way. One invoice clears by card through your Pay button, the next arrives as a bank transfer, and a third lands as a cheque you deposit on a Tuesday. Fee-Lion lets both kinds of money live on the same invoice and the same client, so your totals always tell the truth, no matter how the cash actually showed up.

One invoice, two ways to get paid

Every invoice you send carries a live Pay button for card payments through your connected Stripe account. But not every dollar comes that way, and that’s fine. When a client pays you outside of Fee-Lion, your job is simply to tell the invoice what happened so the balance updates.

1. Open the invoice from the Invoices tab in the left sidebar.
2. For card payments, you do nothing. The moment the client taps Pay and the charge settles in your Stripe, the payment posts itself and the balance drops automatically.
3. For a bank transfer, cheque, or cash, click Record Payment, enter the amount, pick the date it actually arrived, and note the method.
4. Save. The invoice recalculates its outstanding balance instantly, blending the offline entry with anything already paid by card.

Because both payment types reduce the same balance, a $1,000 invoice paid $400 by card and $600 by bank transfer reads as fully paid, not stuck at half.

Split a single invoice across methods

Partial payments are where mixing methods earns its keep. A client might wire you a deposit, then settle the rest by card weeks later, or vice versa. You can stack as many entries as you need until the balance hits zero.

• Record the bank transfer deposit the day it lands, even if the invoice is still mostly open.
• Leave the Pay button live so the client can clear the remainder by card whenever they’re ready.
• Watch the invoice status shift from Partial to Paid on its own once the running total catches up.

Tip: Always set the offline payment’s date to the day the money actually cleared your bank, not the day you got around to logging it. Your invoice aging and revenue reports key off that date, so an accurate entry keeps your Stay ahead of aging view honest and stops a paid invoice from haunting your overdue list.

Trust your totals at a glance

Once card and offline entries are both in the system, your reports stop caring how the money traveled and start showing what you actually earned.

1. Open Reports in the left sidebar and check the ops dashboard for a clean picture of paid versus outstanding across every client.
2. Use the revenue drilldown to confirm a specific client’s total matches what hit your accounts, regardless of method.
3. Reconcile against your bank statement by matching each offline entry’s date and amount, then exporting to CSV or PDF for your bookkeeper.

If you ever record an offline payment by mistake, or log one twice, edit or remove the entry on the invoice and the balance corrects itself. And if a card payment needs reversing, issue a refund through Stripe rather than recording a negative offline entry, so the two systems stay in sync.

Tip: Keep one habit and reconciliation stays trivial: log offline payments the same day they clear. Pair that with card payments posting themselves, and your Invoices list becomes a reliable mirror of your bank account instead of a guessing game.

What’s next

• Record an offline payment
• Take a partial payment
• Connect Stripe to get paid
• Stay ahead of aging