You can take payments against orders in OnRent for account customers and non-account customers (Cash Customers), allowing one centralised place to manage your upfront deposits and payments. This is ideal for businesses that trade with customers over the counter or in a store directly.

First of all the correct user options must be set against the user role. If you are an existing OnRent customer and setting this up for the first time, then this part is important:

Head over to System Setup > Roles. Within there, choose the System Setup tab.

Against the roles, you will see the following privileges.

Payment Method:

Enable these options to allow the user role to create and amend payment methods. Read more about what these are below. These are usually set once when the system is set up and will be rarely used from that point, so these permissions would typically sit with a system administrator.

Payment:

This enables the payment option to be included on the order and invoice screens. If this is not present, the user within the role will not be able to take a payment.

It's important to note there are Create, Read, Write & Delete privileges. Tick them all against the Payment section to enable your users to manage payments.

Payment methods are found within System Setup > Payment Methods. There are two by default with the system, cash and card - you might not want to add or change these; if so, you can move on to the next heading.

By default the system comes with two already setup:

Payment methods are selectable when you take a payment in OnRent. You can specify which one is the default, you can also rename the system default payment methods and you can also add more.

When you add or edit a payment method you'll see the following:

Simply enter a name, description, choose type cash or card and then whether it's active and the default entry when a user takes a payment. That covers off payment methods.

There are a couple of options that can be set against System Setup > Company Details.

The first is "Default Cash Customer Account"

It might be that you want to channel all of your invoices to a nominatedcash account within your finance system. This can be beneficial because:

All invoices will then end up against this CASH account in your finance system, so this means there is a one to many link with the finance account. One cash account in the finance system the various cash customer accounts in OnRent, each with their own balances and the ability to take payments, invoice and order history etc.

To do this, head over to System Setup > Company and choose the preferences tab as shown below.

Usually, if you have a Default Cash account you will want this option to be set to "No" so you can choose not to send all of your potentially one time use cash customer accounts into the integrated finance system.

If connected to Xero or Sage Business Cloud, payments can be posted and taken against invoices.

Against the integration page for Xero, if you would like to post the payments against the invoices and credits in Xero so they are reconciled, switch "Post Payments" to yes, and change the default invoice status to Authorised.

Payments can only be posted against Authorised status invoices (this is a Xero status). If the invoices are not authorised, you must do that first in Xero before a payment can be posted, so setting this to Authorised this will save a few steps.

You must also map the payment methods you have created to a ledger account in Xero.

In order for a ledger account to appear here, you must first set a flag against it in Xero that says "enable payments to this account" as shown below - this is under the Accounting > Chart of Accounts menu when selecting a ledger code and choosing "edit account details".

Once that's done you're all set - the payments will now hit the account linked to the payment method and the invoices and credit notes can now be paid.

Enter the Sage Business cloud settings from the integrations page once connected.

There you can see a post payments button - in order to post payments and refunds to your Sage Business Cloud system you can tick this box.

Then at the bottom of the page you need to map the right account codes and payment methods to your OnRent Payment Methods:

In order for the ledger code to display in the drop down, you must first setup your Sage Business Cloud ledger account to include the following Bank tick box as shown below, in order to save a ledger account with the bank flag you must also put it in the Category of "Bank" or "Credit Card".

Then simply link choose the relevant payment method from the drop down box.

There are two flags on the customer account record that help control the behaviour of those customers.

When creating a new customer you can specify the customer as a "Cash Customer".

Against a product or item you can set a recommended deposit.

If you set them against a product, by default all items contained within that product will have the recommended deposit set against them when taking a payment on an order.

If one or more items inside a product need a different recommended deposit you can specify it against the item, in order for it to use that on an order you must add the item itself rather than a product level booking to start with.

When you have set a customer up as a Cash Customer or flagged that they can have a Payment taken against them, you will see the payment buttons on the order and invoice pages:

Here's the Take Payment button on the toolbar:

And here it is against the Actions Menu:

The Payments Section on the Order:

Recommended Deposits:

When you have set up recommended deposits against your products, you can see that the payments totals on the order shows the recommended deposit totals for all items on the order:

Deposits Held:

When you have taken a deposit against an order, the value of this is shown in Deposits Held.

Refund Outstanding:

This shows the value of any credit notes that have not had a refund applied to them.

Refund Paid:

This shows the total value of refunds applied against the order.

Payment Outstanding:

This shows the total value of posted and unpaid invoices against the order.

Payment Received:

This shows the total value of payments received against the invoices related to an order.

In the instance of providing customers with valuable equipment and in order to mitigate risk, you can take security deposits against rental order items. The recommended deposits against the product are used to calculate the value the user will see on screen.

Taking a deposit is an optional step, you don't have to use this to be able to later take payments against invoices.

Deposits are not posted to the linked accounting system because they are not related to an invoice. They are simply held within OnRent to be used against future invoices for that order, or refunded if necessary.

The idea of a deposit is that it's a security deposit for a specific value that is held against the order until which time you decide to take a payment for an invoice - it might be that the initial deposit of $500 was taken against some rental items on an order. The customer has the equipment for two weeks and the resulting invoice is $750.

At the point in time an invoice is raised, you need to take an additional payment. You can return the deposit and take the full $750 or use the whole or part of the deposit for the invoice payment.

The options on the payment screen allow this to take place.

To take a deposit, click the Payments button:

The Payments window appears. At this stage you can select a payment method. The order number is used as the payment reference but you can change this.

The transaction date defaults to the current date and time but this can be altered. A memo can also be entered.

The amount displayed when you select deposits defaults to the recommended value as a sum of all recommended deposits of the items on the order. You can increase or decrease this at your discretion.

Once you have chosen the amount to take, click Confirm and the deposit payment will then be stored against the order and customer for reference.

You will see the Deposits Held value on the order payments summary has been recorded:

And on the Order Payments tab this is also shown in the history:

Recommended Deposit Warnings:

If you try and marked the order items as to dispatch or book out, and no deposits have been taken, you are presented with a reminder warning.

When the order invoice has been created, confirmed and posted, the amount outstanding will be visible on the order.

This may be more or less than the held deposit value depending on the duration of the rental and any invoiced sales items or services.

Press the Take Payment button:

You can now see that the amount required is set to the same value as the payment outstanding.

When a payment is due you can see the "Use Deposit for Payment" option.

If you do this, the payment amount is taken out of the security deposit.

In this instance we had £350 deposit - if we tick use deposit for payment, then you can see because the invoice value is less than the deposit held, the payment value is reduced to zero and the amount of £141.59 will be taken from the held security deposit. You cannot change the amount taken from the deposit, the maximum amount possible will be used.

This means some deposit will remain as is shown on the Deposit Held area which is adjusted automatically.

You can see against the order payment history that the amount taken from the deposit is shown under the received payment.

In order to return the difference to the customer, click the Payments button again:

You can now see the deposit held, and if you tick "Refund Deposit" then it defaults to the full value of deposits held, you can change this value if needed.

Once you hit confirm, the deposit is refunded. This is shown against the payment history.

In the below instance, the outstanding invoice value exceeds that of the deposit held, you can see that the full £325 from the held order deposits will be used meaning that an additional payment from the customer will be required of £85.39.

This will then show a payment against the order of the total payment plus held deposit value:

You can also not use the held deposit as part of the payment. In order to do this, select "Refund Deposit" to yes, and enter the amount in the Payment field.

You will need to return the deposit to the customer and then take the payment. In the above instance, we are refunding the full £325 security deposit (perhaps the customer has given us cash for this) and then taking a payment of £535.19 (perhaps the customer wants to pay the amount outstanding on their credit card).

If this is done, you can see the deposit refund and payment taken as two separate transactions on the order payment history:

If you just want to refund all or part of a deposit you can do so by pressing the Payments button. It might be the customer has changed their mind about an order and you need to repay them the security deposit.

Here you can choose the Payment button as shown above and click the "Refund Deposit" button. Enter the value of the deposit refund and then hit Confirm.

You will see the deposit is now refunded.

Once an optional Security Deposit has been taken and you are happy to provide the customer with the equipment, you can then dispatch or book out.

When you take a payment for an order, there will be invoices against the order - if a payment lower than the invoice is made this amount is partially allocated to the invoice.

If there are multiple invoices, say for example you had one for £1000 and one for £150 and you took a payment of £1100, then the oldest invoice would have the payment of £1000 allocated against it and then the remaining amount would be paid against the next invoice leaving a balance of £50.

In summary, when you have multiple invoices against an order and take a payment, this is automatically allocated to the oldest invoice first.

If you raise a credit note against an order, you can then process a refund to the value of the credit notes against an order.

In order to take a refund, ensure there is a credit note against the order, you can then process a refund up to the value of the credit notes against the order.

The refund will be shown against the order history.

As shown below, the outstanding balance is shown against the invoice and credit note for completeness, this allows you to see whether a partial or full amount has been paid against an invoice.

If you have an order that is not open ended (you can choose the Open Ended option when creating an order) then you know the end date - it might be an event for example or an agreed rental agreement period. This changes the behaviour of how the Payment screen displays the expected payment values.

Because an end date is known, the estimated total charges are projected.

You can then take a security deposit for an amount of your choosing, you can also raise an advance invoice until the expected end date.

When an invoice has been raised against the order, the projected charges are replaced with the actual invoice values.

If in the unlikely event there has been a connection issue with the integrated accounting system, the payments may fail posting - if this happens you can easily find an unposted payment and go to Actions > Post and there will be an attempt to re-send them.