Prioritizing Payments

Prioritizing Payments

If your organization allows partial payments on orders, you can select which SKUs have a higher priority for payments to be applied towards the accounting income accounts.

*Note: you must also be using the Membership Toolkit Accounting Tools and have Income Accounts assigned to the SKUs you are prioritizing.

Payment Priority is controlled at the SKU level on the Sales Information tab.
  1. Go to Store & Forms / Catalog.
  2. Select a SKU and go to the Sales Information tab.
  3. Update the Payment Application Priority.
  4. All SKUs default to Normal.
  5. You have the option to update the payment priority to 5 different settings - Highest to Lowest Priority. This is only relevant if multiple items are on a single order. The payment priority will be applied in relation to the items on that order.
  6. Once payment priority has been set to something other than Normal, the Catalog screen will show either double/single up arrows or double/single down arrows next to the description on each row.



How Does Payment Priority Work?
  1. When a payment is made on an order, the system will look at all of the SKUs on the order and prioritize them according to the priority setting on the SKU.
  2. Payments will then be applied in that order to those income accounts.
  3. If all of the payment is applied before the system runs out of SKUs/income accounts, it stops and the order will have a balance due.
  4. When a subsequent payment is made, the system will go through this process again, taking into account where it has already applied payments.

A Note for Treasurers:
If a change is made to a SKU on the order or the income account(s) for a SKU, the system will "re-balance” the accounts against the new accounts affected.  This will occasionally require journal entries to “back out” income from one account and put it in another.

Example - 
  1. A band has a SKU for the spring trip that parents purchased along with spirit wear and uniforms, 
  2. If the spirit wear was on a form that was listed before the trip payment and they partial-paid the order, the payment would be applied to the spirit wear first.
  3. But, if later the trip SKU was given higher priority and the parent made a second payment, the system will back out the payment made for the spirit wear and apply it to the trip until the trip accounts were satisfied.
  4. It would then move on to the spirit wear and uniform payments.

Other Notes:
  1. Updating the payment priority on the SKU is not going to adjust current orders in your system. Orders are only adjusted (if needed) when a user logs in and makes another payment.
  2. The form report has been adjusted so that when you choose the option to see orders with a balance due, it sorts by amount due. Keep in mind that the balance due still applies to the entire order and may be related to items purchased from other forms.

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