Cliniko will apply any unallocated payments as account credit on a patient's file. This is really useful if the patient is paying for multiple appointments up front, or is given credit to go towards services or products purchased in the future.

Sometimes, though, you may assign a credit by mistake to a patient, and removing it can seem a bit tricky! All you really need to do though, is find the unallocated payment the credit came from. This tutorial will walk you how to do that, and we'll cover two scenarios:

Find the patient in question, and take note of how much credit they have on file (in the example below, the patient has $50 of credit that needs to be deleted):

Remember that number! Now, head to the patient's Payments page, where you'll see a list of all payments that have been entered under their name:

Each payment has its own "allocation" (meaning, an invoice that it is assigned to). If a payment is entered without being "allocated" to an invoice, it will result in an erroneous credit!

You will need to investigate each payment to figure out which one might be the culprit here. What you specifically want to look for is nothing next to where it says Payment applied to invoices, and a value next to Allocated to account credit:

When you've found the payment that indicates an amount that's been allocated to account credit, you know this is the one! 

If this was a credit entered in error, you'll want to delete it. Click the Archive payment button, and that will take care of it for you:

That covers what to do if you need to totally remove that credit, and pretend like it never existed!

If a patient paid in advance but, for whatever reason, won't be coming in to use their prepayment towards any services, you can issue a refund for that prepayment. To do this, rather than dealing with any existing "credits", as such, you're going to want to create a negative payment.

To do this, head to the Payments tab, and then hit the Add payment button:

On the next page, be sure to enter the patient's name, and then put a negative number into the "Payment source" field. The number should match the amount that you're refunding. For example, here, we're refunding a $50 prepayment, so we enter -50.00:

At the bottom, be sure to press the Save payment button! You'll then be brought to a new screen which indicates the source of the refund, as well as how much the total amount was:

And that's all you need to do—that credit will no longer be on the patient's profile, and a refund will have been recorded!

Now, perhaps deleting isn't what you want to do, and instead, you want to use that credit to pay an invoice! Head over here to learn how to do that.