Pay an invoice

Enter payments against your invoices!

Emily avatar
Written by Emily
Updated this week

When you create an invoice for a patient, you're probably going to want to take payment from them, as well! This tutorial will walk you through how to enter a payment against an open invoice. We'll discuss:


Adding a payment to a new invoice

First things first, be sure that you create your invoice! Once you've done this, it will be time to enter the payment.

Upon creating the invoice, Cliniko will automatically bring you to the New payment page for that invoice:

There are a few things to take note of on this page!

  • The patient's name and business should already be populated for you (this is pulled from the appointment details associated with the invoice). 

  • The payment summary indicates how much is owing.

  • The payment source fields are where you should enter the type of payment (i.e. cash, credit card, EFTPOS, etc.). If you need to add additional payment sources, you'd want to do this by creating new payment types!

Entering a payment is super simple—you'll just enter the amount the patient is paying into the payment source field:

You're able to split payments into different sources! For example, if a patient is paying part cash and HICAPS is covering the rest, you can break the payment into two parts, as in the example below.

Once you've entered the amounts into the appropriate payment source fields, you'll see the total amount in the payment amount field, as well as any remaining (if the patient is paying in full, you should't see any balance still due!):

If the patient has multiple invoices unpaid/open, the amount added to the payment source section will be automatically applied to the oldest invoice.

Make sure to adjust the payment amount in the apply to invoices section if you want to change which invoices are paid.

Double check the correct invoice is being paid in the Apply to invoices section then use the Save payment button, and you'll be brought back to the invoice, which will now have a record of the payment listed with it:

If you click the payment details (the time and date), you'll be brought to the payment summary:

The payment summary will show you:

  • The date and time the payment was made.

  • The patient the payment was for.

  • The payment source.

  • The total amount.

  • Which invoice(s) the payment was applied to (one payment can be applied to multiple invoices!).

The above steps covered how to add a payment for an invoice you've just created. If you want to add a payment for an invoice that already exists (whether it be earlier in the day, last week, or a few months ago!), read on!


Adding a payment to an older invoice

If you've already created the invoice at some point in the past, and it's been sitting open, awaiting payment, the following steps will guide you through how to handle that process!

First, find the invoice in question. Go to Invoices, and you can find the one you want by typing in the patient's name, invoice number, or billing address. All outstanding invoices will be marked with a yellow open flag:

Click the one you want to enter payment for, and then click Enter payment at the bottom:

From there, the process will be exactly the same as entering a payment for a new invoice!


You can also pay invoices by using a patient's account credit, or pay multiple invoices at once!

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