Quickly record payments & refunds received against an invoice and show this to your customer using the “take payment” functionality.

⚠️   This guide is for Current RMS users who are linked to Xero. Not connected to Xero or QuickBooks Online? See: Take payments or mark an invoice as paid

The option to take payment against your invoices will only appear after you've added payment methods to your system. 

To do this, head to System Setup > List of values and edit the list called “Payment Methods”.

On the next screen, use the green "add a list of values entry" button to add a list of ways that you take payments. 

Select one of the payment methods to be the default by ticking the box and clicking the blue Update List of Values button to save.

Head to System Setup > Integrations > Xero and map payment methods in the “Payment Method Mappings” section.

You’ll see a list of your payment methods on the left and a list of Xero accounts on the right. Map each account here.

Xero doesn’t allow us to post payments directly to a bank account, so you’ll need to make sure you map to account codes.

When you set up an account in Xero, you can tick the “Enable payments to this account” box to make sure that it shows up in this list.

Haven’t yet set up your Xero integration? Check out our guide: Set up the Xero integration

Once you’ve set up payment methods, go to an invoice that you’d like to record a payment against and click Take Payment under Actions. Make sure it’s issued and posted first. The “Take Payment” pop-up box appears.

Choose a reference to identify the payment (e.g., “Deposit” or “Part Payment”), select a payment method from the list that you set up earlier, choose a date that the payment was received, and specify the amount received. 

Click the blue Take payment button to add this payment. 

Your payment will be recorded in Xero, and you’ll see that the amount paid and amount due under “Xero Information” have adjusted.

Our product and development team has explored the possibility of updating the invoice status to "Paid" when the full payment has been received in the integrated accounts package. The team found that there are technical limitations to making this functionality possible.

We get a webhook call each time an invoice is created or updated in any way. We have over a thousand customers using the Xero integration with OnRent Events, which means we are handling tens of thousands of webhook calls from Xero daily. With each webhook call, we need to query the Xero API to check if the invoice status has been updated to "Paid". This will result in additional tens of thousands of API calls, which potentially exhausts the maximum number of API calls Xero allows us to make per day. This puts us at risk of the Xero integration being completely halted when we have exhausted our daily limit, which would cause major disruptions for our users as they would not be able to post invoices or sync contacts.

Ultimately, these technical limitations from Xero mean that we cannot use the webhooks in the way we'd like to update the invoice status to "Paid." We have been, and continue to be, in contact with the technical team at Xero for recommendations on the best way to achieve this without having to handle or make many API calls, and have yet to be provided with a solution.

Not currently, but this is something we're considering for future development. If you'd like to see this added, please reach out to us using the green help bubble in the bottom right-hand corner of the system to share your thoughts.

Xero provides integrations with third-party payment providers such as PayPal or GoCardless so you can get invoices paid once posted from OnRent Events. Check with Xero about available integrations.