What This Does
After you save a payment, most details cannot be changed. You can still correct the date, reference number, payer, billing address, memo, and notes without changing the money.
You cannot directly change the amount, the invoice lines the payment paid, the accounts it used, or its status. The payment type or method is also fixed; for example, a wire transfer cannot later become store credit. If any of those details are wrong, void the payment and receive a new one instead.
You can delete a payment only after it has been voided. If the payment already has a related credit or refund, you can no longer void or delete it, so fix a mistaken payment before issuing a refund or credit against it.
A real partial payment that was never refunded, voided, or reversed still appears in the customer's recent and member-facing payment history. There is no separate way to hide a valid partial payment from that display. To remove it from view, undo the payment itself with a refund, void, or reversal instead of trying to hide the record.
When to Use It (and Not)
Use this task to fix a typo in a check number, correct the date you received a payment, or add internal notes later. If the amount or paid invoices are wrong, editing the details will not fix the payment; see Void or Reverse a Payment instead.
Choose the correction that matches what happened. Reverse a payment when you want to back it out without sending a refund. Void it when the payment should not have gone through at all and you also want the money returned. If a posted payment was applied to the wrong invoice or customer, void it, or issue a refund, and receive a new payment applied correctly. Do not delete the original to fix this, because deleting does not change which invoices were paid and can leave your records incomplete. To move value from one invoice to another without touching the original payment, issue a credit on the payment and apply that credit to the correct invoice.
If a payment was recorded under the wrong method, such as a wire transfer that should have been a different type, reverse the payment first. Then apply a debit memo to the affected invoice line so the balance due is restored, and enter the payment again with the correct method.
Prerequisites
- You can open the payment's page in Finance & Billing › Transactions.
- To delete a payment, it must already be voided. Reversed, refunded, and complete payments can't be deleted.
Steps
- Go to Finance & Billing › Transactions and open the payment you want to correct.
- From Payment Options, choose Edit Details.
- Update the Date, the check or reference number, the payer and billing address, the Memo, or Internal Notes as needed.
- Select Save Changes.
Tip
If you only need to refresh an outdated organization name on the payment, reopen Edit Details and select Save Changes even if nothing else changed. For example, do this after you correct the contact's organization elsewhere. If the linked order shows an outdated organization name too, re-saving that order can clear it there as well.
Variants
- Deleting a payment. Void the payment first; see Void or Reverse a Payment. After the payment is void, open Payment Options and choose Delete. Confirm when Rhythm asks whether you're sure you want to delete the payment.
- Removing many mistaken or fraudulent payments at once. Support and Engineering won't delete financial transactions on your behalf. If you need to remove a batch yourself, such as after fraudulent contact records were removed, find them in Finance & Billing › Transactions and use Bulk Changes to delete them together after each one has been voided.
- Correcting an imported external payment on the wrong record. You cannot edit or move an external payment from another system the way you can edit a saved payment. Instead, enter a manual payment on the correct record, or re-import the external payment with corrected information using the Custom Data Task tool in Security and Settings.
- Correcting a paid order created under the wrong account. If an order and invoice were created under a contact instead of the organization that should have been billed, do not try to fix it by editing the payment. Cancel the incorrect order, choose to issue a credit rather than a refund, create a new order for the organization with a pay-later option, and apply the credit to the new order.
- Correcting many historical payment descriptions at once. If a batch of payment descriptions is wrong, correct them together instead of opening each payment. Build a Finance query for the relevant payment type, then prepare a mass update using each row's payment ID as the anchor, along with the current incorrect description and the replacement you want.
- A duplicate check against an invoice that's already paid. When a duplicate check arrives through your lockbox integration for an invoice that is already paid, Rhythm converts it into store credit instead of applying it to the invoice again. If you stop the check, void the resulting credit rather than trying to edit or delete the converted payment.
Result
The payment page shows the updated date, reference number, payer, or notes right away. The payment's amount, lines, accounts, and status do not change.
Side Effects
Changing the payer on a saved payment does not move the invoices or credits the payment settled. If you assign the payment to a different customer, that customer's statement will show the payment, but the invoices it paid stay where they are. This means the statement and paid invoices can disagree. Only change the payer to fix a real mistake in who was recorded as paying, not to move the payment's effect from one customer to another.
Editing payment details can also fail when the payment's recorded organization no longer matches the organization on the invoice or order it paid. This can happen after the payer's contact is moved to a different organization. In that case, saving the edit can return an error, and you usually need to correct the organization mismatch on the invoice or order first.
Changing a payment's date also changes the date used in reconciliation outputs and query results that include the payment, because they use the same field. Double-check the date before saving if your association reconciles or reports from these records.
Deleting a payment removes the record Support would use later to confirm what happened. If you delete both a payment and a related payment tied to the same invoice, you and Support cannot reconstruct the sequence from the record's history afterward. Consider voiding instead of deleting whenever you might need to look back at what happened.
What to Do If It Fails
- Rhythm refuses the save with a message about an illegal change to a field. You, or the form, tried to change something outside the details that can be corrected. This usually happens when the same save includes the amount, a line, or an account. Reopen Edit Details and change only the date, reference number, payer, address, memo, or notes.
- Delete is unavailable, with a note that only voided payments may be deleted. The payment has not been voided yet. Void it first, then delete it.
- Delete is still unavailable after voiding, or Support says it can't remove the payment either. Some payments, such as payments that were already refunded or are otherwise stuck, can't be deleted from the Console. Support can't delete them directly either. Removing a payment like this usually needs Engineering, and it can take a while. In the meantime, add a memo or internal note explaining the situation.
- You can't open a payment that a paid invoice or order still lists in its related transactions. A payment record can become inaccessible even though other records still point to it. Opening it may show an error saying the record can't be found. Contact Support, because restoring a payment like this takes individual review. The restored payment may end up with a different payment number than the one originally linked. If the inaccessible payment is holding up something else, such as a membership's expiration date, you may be able to update that related record manually while Support works on the payment.
- A payment fails to move into a batch, or won't delete, because it references a product that no longer exists. Contact Support to resolve a payment tied to a deleted product. This needs to be corrected behind the scenes.
- You corrected a payment's or invoice's date, but an order's related transactions still show the old date. The payment and invoice pages show the corrected date right away, but the order's related-transactions display does not update to match. This is only a display issue; the payment and invoice records have the correct date.
- The invoice still shows as unpaid after you delete a payment. Deleting a payment does not reverse its effect on an invoice by itself. Always void a payment before deleting it, so the invoice shows the amount owed again. More generally, when an invoice's status and its payment's status disagree, correct them in that order: void first, then delete or make another correction. That sequence helps you avoid leaving an incorrect ledger entry behind. If you're unsure whether a deleted payment left an invoice's balance wrong, check the invoice directly.
Warning
Delete a payment only when you're sure it should never have existed. If you only need to undo its effect on a customer's balance, void it and leave it on the record instead of deleting it. Once a payment is deleted, nobody, including Support, can retrieve it or see its details again. If you keep a voided payment on the record instead of deleting it, it can help to note it in your own accounting records too. The voided payment's Print Receipt option gives you a concise copy of its details for that purpose.