Recording a cheque, cash or card payment by hand

Any payment you take outside LakeOps — a cheque at the dock, cash, a card run on your own terminal — is recorded by hand against the job it paid for, and it counts exactly the same as an online payment everywhere in the app.

A cheque handed over at the dock is not a second-class payment. LakeOps records it as the same kind of thing as a card paid online, and nothing downstream asks which is which.

Recording one

Payments attach to a job, because the job is the thing that has a price. Open the job, record the payment, enter the amount, and say how it was paid: card, bank transfer, cheque, cash or other.

LakeOps notes who recorded it and when, and works out which customer it belongs to from the job. That is the whole entry.

Partial payments and deposits

Record what actually arrived. A job can carry several payments and the balance simply reflects the difference. A deposit in April and the rest in June is two payment rows, and at no point is anybody asked to reconcile them by hand.

Refunds

A refund attaches to the payment it reverses, and partial refunds are supported. What everything reads afterwards is the net — collected minus refunded.

This matters more than it sounds. A partial refund that only showed on the payment would leave the job reading as paid in full and the report telling you money you no longer have. Net collected is the figure the balance, the customer page and the report all use.

Where a recorded payment shows up

On the job — as its balance.
On the customer — billed, collected, outstanding, and what they were worth by season.
On the property — same shape, one shoreline.
On the completed-work report, which can filter to paid or unpaid work.
On the customer’s own completion page, so somebody who pays by cheque and then follows the link does not see a demand for money they already sent.

This works in both payment modes

Recording payments by hand is not a fallback for shops without online payments. Even with LakeOps Payments switched on, some customers will hand you a cheque at the landing, and that cheque gets recorded here exactly the same way.

What this is not

It is not double-entry bookkeeping, and it is not trying to be. There is no ledger, no accounts receivable module and no accounting sync. It is a record of what you charged and what came back, which is what your bookkeeper actually needs from an operations system — see getting your data back out.

Still stuck? Ask us — or go back to the help center.