Due payments
What this is for
Money you're owed on orders that already happened.
Every restaurant has some. The ones that hurt are the ones nobody is looking at.
How an order becomes due
- Pay Later was chosen deliberately — an account customer, a staff meal, a table settling at the end of the week.
- A partial payment was taken and the rest left outstanding.
- A delivery went out unpaid and the cash never came back.
- An online payment failed after the order was accepted.
Finding them
Payment Due shows on the order itself, and orders can be filtered by payment status under Orders.
The reporting side gives you the totals — what's owed, by whom, and how old it is.
What you can't do to a due order
Items can't be added or removed from an order with payment due.
You cannot add or remove items from a payment due order. Use Add Payment to collect payment.
Collect first. Anything extra goes on a new order.
This looks obstructive on a busy night and isn't: an order whose contents change after it's been billed makes the amount owed impossible to defend.
Collecting
Open the order, select Add Payment, take the money as normal. The remaining amount is shown as you go, and the order clears when it reaches zero.
Running due payments properly
Due payments only work as a facility if they're managed like one.
- Decide who gets credit, and make it a short list. "Pay Later" available to every cashier for every customer isn't a policy.
- Attach a customer, always. An unpaid order with no customer is money owed by nobody. See Customer records.
- Set a term and say it out loud. End of week, end of month — whatever it is, agree it rather than leaving it open.
- Look at the list weekly. Not monthly. Debt is easiest to collect while everyone still remembers the meal.
- Chase from oldest. Age is the best predictor of whether you'll ever see it.
Staff meals and internal orders
Plenty of "due" orders are internal — staff food, tastings, comps.
Give them their own custom order type rather than letting them sit in your due list. They're a cost, not a debt, and mixing them makes both numbers wrong.
Good to know
- Payment status is independent of order status. An order can be Completed and still owed. See The order journey.
- Cash on delivery has its own tracking — see Cash on delivery and settlements.
- Expenses have a mirror-image concept: money you owe suppliers, with its own due dates. See Expenses.
- Cancelling an order deletes its payments. Never cancel to clear a debt — collect it, or write it off as a refund so the record shows what happened.