Invoices - how do I record a Venmo payment with a tip for accuracy?

[whimsyphant]

I own an online bakery, and send customers invoices when they place an order.  If they pay by credit card, things are easy, but I'm having a problem when they pay by Venmo.

If a customer pays by Venmo, what is the most accurate way for me to record their payment so that my Square are correct?  I'm running into an issue when their invoice says "$25" and they pay $30, including a $5 tip.  When choosing "Other" for the payment type, I can't record anything over the $25 owed.  Plus, Venmo fees are taken out, so should I be recording the actual amount I receive instead of the full $30 anyway? 

How do I record their "Other" payment while accurately reflecting the tip?  And then how do I record what I actually received vs what they paid?

Again - this is all done through Invoices.   

[Minion]

Hi @whimsyphant 

In this situation, since you are just using the invoice as a "statement type receipt" I'm pretty sure that the following will work for your situation and maybe make life a bit easier down the road for future sales with venmo.

First I would start off by creating a  x2 New Service Items in your Item Library, labeled something like Venmo Sale and second on labeled Venmo Tips and categorize it under a misc. category or whatever category best suits your needs.  The settings below can be used for both new Service Items

Price & Duration Section

-Set price to Variable

-Set duration to any amount of time you like

-disable "bookable by customers online"

-Save

Now, to make things easier for bookkeeping purposes you can create a Discount labeled Venmo Service Charge. (We know its not a discount but to properly account for it, it needs to be subtracted from the total.)  Dashboard >Items > Discounts and create and save that with their percentage fee that is used (3%?) So at the end of the year, just remember that this "discount" wasn't really a discount.

So If I got this right, according to your description (assuming no sales taxes were applied) and assuming that they don't apply their fee to the tip. 

Let me know if this helps or not and maybe some things can be tweaked and switched around. 

[whimsyphant]

Hi, Dan,

If I'm understanding this correctly, it won't work for us.

When a customer puts in an order request on our website, we send them an invoice that lists every item and quantity they're ordering, an includes a delivery fee, if applicable.  They can then pay directly from the invoice with a credit card, through Square (including a tip if they'd like to), or they send us that amount through Venmo, again, sometimes including a tip.  

Things are easy if they pay through the invoice.  If they pay through Venmo, we then have an "unpaid" invoice still to deal with.  Right now, the only solution I see is for us to go in and "add a payment" using the "other" method in Square.  We know that everything marked as "other" is a Venmo payment.  The problem, though, is that we can't add in the tip they gave.

If we were to edit their original invoice in any way, it sends them a copy of that invoice.  (There's no way I see to edit the invoice and NOT send a copy.)  If we record the tip as a separate transaction, we run into the issue of recording less than they paid - if we take out the Venmo fee as a "discount" - or recording the full amount they paid, but somehow needing to record our Venmo fees somewhere else.  If we record the Venmo fees as a discount, we don't ever see the full amount they intending to pay anywhere.  And if we were to send them a copy of that tip transaction - minus fees/plus Venmo "discount" - for a receipt, they don't get an accurate receipt with what they paid.

Did that all make sense?