One cheque against a stack of invoices

A fleet's accounts department pays the way accounts departments pay: one cheque, one reference, eleven invoices, no instructions. Entering that as eleven separate payments is where an afternoon goes.

Open Fleets, pick the account, and find the Statement section. Under the aging tiles is a card headed Apply one payment across these invoices. You need the key that lets you take a payment; the figures on the section additionally need money visibility for the shop's own figures.

How the money lands

Every open invoice on the account — across every one of your locations — is listed under Unpaid invoices for this fleet, each one ticked by default in the Apply column. Untick anything the cheque is not for.

Enter the whole amount once in Payment, pick the Tender, and put the cheque number in Cheque / reference. Press Apply payment and it runs down the ticked invoices oldest first, taking each one's balance and moving on.

To override that, type a figure in the Put this much here column beside an invoice. Directed amounts are taken out of the pot first and applied exactly — never rounded up to the balance, never trimmed — and whatever is left spills down the rest oldest first.

An empty box and a typed zero mean different things, and this is the one place it matters. Empty means no instruction, so that invoice takes its turn in the spill. Zero means not this one: no money and no payment recorded against it.

Each portion is written as an ordinary payment against its own invoice, with the same tender and the same reference on all of them. There is no combined row and nothing special about them afterwards — the drawer, end of day, receivables and the books all read them the way they read any other payment.

When they paid too much

Nothing is ever applied past a balance. If the cheque is bigger than what the ticked invoices owe, the surplus is handed back to you in words rather than absorbed: $20.00 of that payment is still unapplied — it was more than these invoices owed, so nothing was over-applied.

That is not a design flourish, it is a consequence. Torqix has no credit balance and no account ledger to park money in, and the screen says so where you can see it before you press the button. What you do with the twenty dollars is a conversation with the customer; the product will not pretend to be holding it.

Paying less than the total is ordinary. The oldest invoices settle, the rest are left exactly as they were, and the aging tiles move accordingly.

When it refuses the lot

A batch is all or nothing. If any part of it is wrong, no payment row is written at all — you do not end up with four of eleven applied and a puzzle. The sentences you will meet:

• 900.00 directed at an invoice that only owes 412.00 — a payment never exceeds a balance
• the directed amounts add to 5000.00, which is more than the 4180.00 payment
• pick at least one invoice for this payment to land on
• one of those invoices is no longer open, or is not on this account — reload the statement and try again
• INV-0042 belongs to a different customer — one payment settles one account
• INV-0042 is demo data and this payment is not — they cannot be mixed

The balances are always re-read on the server, so a tab that has been open since this morning cannot apply against yesterday's figures. If somebody at the counter takes money on one of these invoices while you are typing, the whole batch stops rather than over-applying.

It lands on the audit trail as one line naming the total, the count and the leftover, and each individual payment is recorded against its own invoice as well.