You negotiated a Quote, you've Dispatched and delivered the load, you sent out an Invoice – and hopefully, at the end of this long road, you will get paid. When a cheque arrives from one of your Customers, you can use the Incoming Payment Wizard to process that payment and match it up with any outstanding Invoices pending for that Customer.

The Incoming Payment Wizard is found in the Tools section of the left navigation.

First, select the Customer whose payment you want to process. Then, fill in the Cheque Number, the date the cheque was received, and the amount of the payment.

If you want to assign the check to a specific deposit, click the 'Automatically Deposit Payment' – this will bring up fields to select the Account to deposit into and record the date of the deposit. This will create a Deposit record in the Deposits list.

When you have filled out all the necessary information, click the 'Next' button to continue to Step 2.

Once you have clicked the 'next' button, a (sometimes very short) list will appear showing all the available Invoice batches for the Customer you have selected. This will include a default 'batch' for stand-alone Invoices, and if you do not use batching, you will want to click on the one available checkbox to proceed. If you use Invoice batching, select the batch that matches the incoming payment.

Once you have selected one of the batches, a list of outstanding Invoices for the Customer in question will appear below.

Distribute the incoming payment between the outstanding Invoices by entering the amount to apply towards each Invoice in the 'Applied' field. The 'Remaining Balance' field displays how much of the payment remains unassigned.

Once you have assigned the full payment amount, click 'Process.'

Sometimes a customer will be unwilling or unable to pay the entire amount of an Invoice — in this case, Tailwind allows you to either carry over or write off the outstanding balance. Once you enter an applied amount less than the invoice total, these options appear under the' Status' column. If you decide to write off the balance, you can add a note indicating the reason for the write-off to the end of the line.

If after you have fully paid all the outstanding Invoices, it turns out that the Customer has overpaid — if there is still a Remaining Balance — then clicking on the 'Process with Positive Balance' button will bring up a Post box. As with an underpaid invoice, you can either carry over the balance – in this case, as a Credit to the Customer — or write it off.

In either case, the system will create an Invoice for a negative amount — you will need to select a Charge Type to use for this Invoice. Suppose this is the first time you have had to extend credit to the customer. In that case, you may need to create an Expense Item, such as 'Overpayment' or 'Credit.' Once you have selected the appropriate charge type, click the button that matches your choice to finish processing the payment.