Finance & Billing lets you pay open invoices in the Portal. You can pay several invoices at once, pay one invoice’s full balance, or pay an invoice someone shared with you by link. After you pay, you can review your payment history and download receipts.
When to Use This
Use this task when you need to pay open invoices in the Portal, review your payments and receipts, or pay an invoice from a shared link. To review an invoice before you pay it, see View and Access an Invoice in the Portal. To add or manage the cards and bank accounts you use for payments, see Manage Your Saved Payment Methods in the Portal.
Prerequisites
- You must be signed in to the Portal and linked to a contact record, unless you are paying from a shared invoice link.
- You can pay only by card, electronic check, payroll deduction, or store credit. The Portal does not accept cash or paper check payments; association staff record those payments for you.
- Portal payments must use one of Rhythm's supported payment options. You cannot pay through an outside payment gateway your association uses elsewhere, such as Bill.com.
- A VPN or virtual desktop connection can keep payment fields from appearing for security reasons. If this happens, disconnect from the VPN before you start.
Pay Several Open Invoices at Once
This page shows only the invoices you are allowed to pay directly. If an invoice is billed to your organization, you see it here only when you have payment authority for that organization. Without that authority, you cannot pay the invoice, even if a colleague can. Invoices billed to a related child organization can also appear with your own when your association has set the page to show organization invoices and you have permission to pay for that organization.
- Go to Make a Payment.
- Select the checkbox next to each invoice line you want to pay, or select Select all invoices to pay everything shown. Select all invoices selects every row on the page, including separate lines from the same invoice. To pay less than the full amount for a line, lower the amount up to its balance.
- If a line is for a membership package, you may see a checkbox to renew it automatically. Select it if you want to turn on automatic renewal.
- Choose or add a payment method.
- Select Make Payment.
Result
Rhythm processes the selected lines as a payment and shows a confirmation with the new payment number.
Warning
You can pay your own invoices or your organization’s invoices from this page, but you cannot include both in the same payment. If you select lines from both, Rhythm clears the selection and tells you to pay them separately. Every line in one payment must also use the same currency.
Whether Make a Payment opens this page depends on how your association set up invoice payments. If your association uses a different setup, Make a Payment takes you straight to your account summary, where you pay each invoice from its own page instead. See View and Access an Invoice in the Portal.
Pay One Invoice from Its Own Page
Open the invoice, as described in View and Access an Invoice in the Portal. If a payment form appears below the invoice totals, choose a payment method and select Make Payment. This pays the invoice’s full remaining balance, so you cannot make a partial payment from this page. If the invoice includes an optional card processing fee, you may see a checkbox to cover that fee yourself when you pay by card.
Warning
Some signed-in users have seen an "Unable to change address access denied" error when adding a new card or bank account here. If this happens, cancel adding the payment method and try again. The billing address field has been seen to populate correctly the second time.
Pay a Shared Invoice Link Without Signing In
Anyone with a link to a specific invoice can pay it in full by card or electronic check, even without a Portal account.
- Open the invoice link.
- Enter your first name, last name, and email address.
- Choose or enter a payment method. If the invoice has an optional card processing fee, you may see a checkbox to cover it.
- Select Submit Payment.
Result
Rhythm processes the payment for the invoice’s full balance and shows a confirmation that a receipt has been sent to the email address you entered.
Warning
If the invoice includes a required card processing fee instead of an optional one, Rhythm may add it to the amount charged when you pay by card. The fee is not shown before you pay, so the amount charged can be more than the invoice balance.
If the link’s identifier and code do not match what Rhythm has on file, Rhythm refuses the payment. See View and Access an Invoice in the Portal for what you see when an invoice is cancelled or already paid.
Tip
If this page loads with no place to enter card details, clear your browser cache and reload it. If the card fields still do not appear, sign in to the Portal instead. Add a card there, then pay the invoice from your account.
Paying from a VPN can make Rhythm treat your session as anonymous traffic, which the payment page will not accept. If this happens, disconnect from the VPN and try again.
View Your Payments and Receipts
- Go to My Financial Overview or Corporate Account Summary for your organization’s payments.
- In the Recent Payments list, select the payment’s Payment # link.
Result
The payment page shows the payment status, number, date, amount paid, who it is billed to, any message from your association, and a line for each invoice or credit it covers.
This page always shows the same fixed set of fields because it does not use your payment receipt templates. It may leave out details that appear on the downloadable receipt, such as the payment method used. If the payment covered more than one invoice, each invoice also lists the payment under its own related transactions, so anyone reviewing that invoice can see who made the payment.
Select Download on the payment page to open a printable receipt in a new window. The receipt shows the payment method used, such as the card type and last four digits. If that page does not have a working print option, use your browser's own print command instead, such as File > Print or Ctrl/Cmd + P.
If you paid for an order placed before January 2, 2026, you might still see a pending-payment banner on it even though you already paid. This was fixed for orders placed after that date.
View Payments Recorded Outside Rhythm
Your account summary can also show payments your association recorded outside Rhythm’s payment processing, such as a payment taken through another service. These payments appear in a separate older-payments section of your account summary with a description of what they were for. They do not link to a payment page and do not include a downloadable Rhythm receipt. If a long description has no spaces, it can overlap nearby text in that older-payments list. That is a display issue with the description itself, not a sign that anything is wrong with the payment.
If Your Payment Is Refused
If Rhythm cannot process your payment, you see a message explaining why, and your entries stay on the page so you can correct them. Common reasons include an invalid or incomplete payment method, a payment type your association has not set up for Portal payments, such as a non-electronic payment type, or a payment batch your association has already closed for the day. For some declined card payments, the payment gateway returns only a generic error, and Rhythm can only pass that message along. A more specific decline reason may not be available even in your association's own records, so staff may need to check with the payment processor directly for the exact decline code before they can tell you more.
Warning
A VPN or virtual desktop connection can cause payment problems that look generic, such as a message that Rhythm is unable to process the transaction, a payment form that never finishes loading, or missing card-entry fields. These messages do not always mention the VPN as the cause. If you are on a VPN or a service such as Citrix, disconnect and try again, or retry from a different network or device, such as a mobile hotspot.
A few less common situations can also cause a refusal:
- If you already paid a different invoice with the same card through a separate shared payment link, a duplicate-payment error can appear on a later invoice even though it is a new payment. This comes from the card network's own duplicate-transaction check, not from anything wrong with your payment.
- If a combined credit-card payment for several invoices at once is refused, try paying each invoice separately instead. A card payment that fails when several invoices are selected together has, in some cases, gone through when submitted one invoice at a time.
- Applying available store credit that fully covers an invoice's balance can sometimes fail to complete here, even though the same credit applies successfully when your association processes it directly. Contact your association if this happens.
- In rare cases, Rhythm may show a payment as failed and leave the invoice open even though the payment succeeded and the funds were received. Contact your association if you believe a payment reported as failed actually went through.
- A payment can fail before it reaches the payment processor if the invoice's underlying order is missing information. Contact your association so they can check it.
- You might see a generic error, such as one saying the transaction could not be processed, even though the payment gateway shows some activity for that attempt. If this happens, wait a few minutes before retrying, or contact your association to check whether the payment actually went through.
The exact wording you see is not always documented, so contact your association if the message you get is not explained here. If the problem continues, contact your association for help; they may be able to process a blocked card payment for you directly.
Related Reading
Before you pay, review what an invoice covers in View and Access an Invoice in the Portal. To add or remove a saved card or bank account, see Manage Your Saved Payment Methods in the Portal. For your overall balance across every invoice and payment, see View Your Account Summary in the Portal.