Credit Balance
How a client's prepaid balance is topped up, what it pays for automatically, the adjustments and refunds staff can make, and where the balance and its history are shown.
What the credit balance is
Every client account carries a single credit balance: prepaid money the client has with you, held in that client’s own billing currency. It funds hourly (prepaid) services, it can settle renewals automatically, and the client can choose to spend it at checkout.
The balance is a running total backed by a full ledger. Every movement — a top-up, an hourly charge, a manual adjustment by staff, a refund — is recorded as its own entry with the balance that remained after it, so the figure on screen can always be traced back through the history that produced it.
A balance can never go below zero. Anything that would push it negative is refused or clamped.
Where you see it
In the admin panel
Open Clients, choose a client, and look at Client Details:
- The statistics strip at the top of the client’s overview shows Credit Balance, formatted in the client’s currency.
- The Credits tab holds everything else: Current Balance in large type, the three action buttons, and the full Transaction History.
In the client portal
The client sees the same money in Invoices & Payments: an Available Credit card with an Add Credit button, and a Credit History tab alongside Invoices & Proformas. The history there shows Type, Description, Date, Amount and Balance After, and names the staff member on any entry a member of your team created.
How a client adds funds
The client does it themselves
- In the portal, the client opens Invoices & Payments and clicks Add Credit.
- The dialog shows their current balance and what it will be afterwards, six preset amounts, and a free-text box for any other amount inside the permitted range.
- They pick a payment method from the methods you have enabled (see Payment Gateways).
- Depending on your policy, they either see a tick-box offering to store the payment method for future top-ups and automatic payments, or a notice telling them it will be stored.
- They confirm and are taken to the payment provider.
The permitted range comes from Settings → Billing → Credit Settings, where Min Deposit (default 5.00) and Max Deposit (default 1000.00) are entered in your company’s base currency. A client billed in another currency sees both limits, the presets and the error messages converted into their own currency. Below the minimum or above the maximum, the top-up is refused with the limit stated in the client’s currency.
You raise the request for them
On the client’s Credits tab, Generate Deposit Proforma creates a payable document for a top-up: enter an Amount, optionally a Due Date and Notes. The dialog describes exactly what happens: “Create a proforma that the client must pay to add funds to their balance. When fully paid, an invoice is generated and funds are credited automatically.” Use this for bank-transfer customers and for agreed prepayments.
Automatically, for prepaid customers
In Settings → Billing, the Automatic Credit Top-up (prepaid / hourly) section keeps hourly customers from running dry:
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable automatic credit top-up | Off by default. When a prepaid customer’s balance drops below the threshold, charge their saved payment method to bring it back up to the target. |
| Top up when below | The trigger balance. |
| Top up to | The balance to restore. Must be higher than the threshold, or nothing runs. |
| Cooldown | Minimum hours between two top-ups for the same customer. Defaults to 24. |
It applies only to customers who are enrolled in automatic payment and have an active stored payment method; a customer with one shared balance and several hourly services is charged once, not once per service. Success and failure are both emailed to the customer.
What document a top-up produces
Every top-up starts as a proforma with a single line reading Account Credit Deposit. The moment it is fully paid:
- the credit is added to the balance;
- the proforma becomes a final invoice of type Credit Deposit — unless consolidated monthly invoicing is in use with top-ups included, in which case the top-up joins that month’s single invoice instead. See Consolidated Monthly Invoicing.
Top-ups are issued without VAT unless you turn on Apply VAT to Credit Deposits in Settings → Billing → Credit Settings (off by default), which then calculates VAT from the client’s country like any other document. Ask your accountant which treatment is right for you before changing it.
How credit is spent — read this carefully
This is the part operators most often get wrong, so it is worth stating flatly. The balance is not a pot that pays whatever is open on the account.
Always: hourly usage
Hourly (prepaid) services deduct from the balance directly, every hour, as usage accrues. This happens whatever the automatic-credit setting says — it is how prepaid billing works, not a convenience. Each hour appears in the ledger as a Deduction, and the month’s hourly charges are summarised on their own monthly document.
When enabled: renewals
In Settings → Billing → Credit Settings, Auto-Apply Credit to Renewals makes the balance settle renewal documents automatically as they are raised. It is on when a company is first set up. The description under the switch says exactly what the rule is: “Use the credit balance to pay renewal invoices and proformas at the moment they are generated. Credit is never applied to documents that already exist: a top-up or a manual credit adjustment stays on the balance until the client pays with it. New orders, upgrades and add-ons are paid from credit only when the client chooses it at checkout; hourly billing always draws on the balance.”
If the balance is smaller than the renewal, part of it is applied and the remainder stays payable by another method. A top-up that lands later is not applied to that renewal by itself — nor to any other document that already exists. The money stays on the balance until the client opens the document and pays it with credit, so a part-paid renewal is finished by the client, not by the platform.
Allow User Override, directly underneath, also on for a new company, lets each client decide for themselves in their portal profile. Their choices are Use Platform Default, Always Apply Credit and Never Apply Credit. With the override off, clients see a notice that the choice is not theirs to make and your setting applies to everyone.
Never automatic: new orders, upgrades and add-ons
A new order, an upgrade, or an add-on option purchase is never swept from the balance. Money in the balance was put there for the client’s running services, and credit an administrator adds by hand is settling an account — neither is approval to pay for whatever new purchase happens to be open.
Those documents are paid from credit only when someone chooses it explicitly:
- The client at checkout. On the order checkout page, a client with a balance sees a Use credit balance toggle showing the amount available. Switching it on applies the balance to the order; if it covers the whole total, no payment method is needed and the order completes there and then. If it covers only part, the remainder is paid with a chosen method.
- You, on the document. On Invoice Details or Proforma Details there is a Pay with Credit button. It opens a panel showing the available credit and the amount due, and lets you apply any amount up to the smaller of the two. A part-payment is allowed — the document stays open for the rest.
Note: A credit-deposit document can never be paid from credit — paying a top-up out of the balance it tops up is circular, so the Pay with Credit button does not appear on one.
Adjustments, refunds and corrections
Adding or removing credit by hand
On the client’s Credits tab, Add Credit and Remove Credit open the same dialog with the sign reversed. Enter an Amount in the client’s currency and a Reason (required, 3 to 500 characters). If a removal would exceed the current balance, a warning appears with the balance shown, and the save is refused with Adjustment would result in negative balance.
The entry lands in the history as an Adjustment carrying your reason and your name, so anyone reading the ledger later can see who moved the money and why. Adjustments are the right tool for goodwill credit, agreed write-offs and correcting an amount taken in error.
Refunds that return money to the balance
When you refund a payment that was made from credit, the amount goes back onto the balance as a Refund entry and the client can spend it again.
The reverse also holds, and matters more. When you refund a top-up — the payment that granted credit in the first place — the credit it granted is taken back at the same time, so the client does not keep both the balance and the money. Two details to know:
- The claw-back is clamped at whatever is still in the balance. If the client has already spent part of the top-up, only what remains can be reclaimed, and the shortfall is reported back to you rather than being quietly written off. Chase it as a debt.
- A partial refund reclaims only the refunded share.
The reversal is recorded as its own compensating entry rather than by erasing the original deposit, so both legs stay visible in the history.
Deleting a credit payment or a ledger entry
Deleting a credit payment from a document’s timeline also unwinds the deduction that funded it, so the money returns to the client’s balance. The panel asks you to confirm this specifically before it happens.
A ledger entry can also be deleted directly from the Transaction History, using the delete control at the end of its row. Doing so recalculates the running balance of every entry recorded after it, so the history stays internally consistent. Treat this as a repair tool for entries created in error, not as routine housekeeping — an adjustment leaves a better audit trail than a deletion.
Reading the Transaction History
The table on the Credits tab has five columns — Date, Type, Description, Amount and Balance — and is sortable by each of them.
| Type | What it means |
|---|---|
| Deposit | Credit added by a paid top-up. |
| Deduction | Credit spent — an hourly charge, or a document settled from the balance. Shown as a negative amount. |
| Adjustment | A manual movement by a member of your team, or the reversal of a refunded top-up. The reason and the staff member’s name are shown. |
| Refund | Money returned to the balance. |
Where an entry relates to a document or a service, the description carries a link through to it.
Hourly charges are grouped
An hourly service produces one charge an hour, which would otherwise bury every other entry. The history therefore collapses them into one line per service per calendar month, showing the service (with its hostname and address where known), the number of hours and the month, the summed amount and the balance after that month’s final charge.
- View N charges expands the group into the individual hourly entries.
- The delete control on a grouped row removes every charge in that group at once and rebuilds the running balance afterwards.
The grouping is display only — the underlying hourly entries are never altered.
Exporting the history
Export PDF, above the table, downloads the client’s complete credit history as a PDF containing the same rows in the same order as the screen, including the grouped hourly lines. The button is disabled when the client has no credit history. The client can see the same history in their own portal.
Currency
A balance is held in one currency: the client’s billing currency. Every amount on the Credits tab, in the adjustment dialog and in the portal is shown in that currency.
Your deposit limits and the hourly minimum are stored in the company base currency and converted for display and validation, so a single pair of limits works across every currency you sell in.
Warning: Changing a client’s billing currency from Client Details offers to convert their invoices, proformas and services at current rates. The credit balance is not part of that conversion — the number stays as it is and is simply displayed in the new currency. If a client with a balance changes currency, work out the correct figure and post an adjustment for the difference, with the reason recorded.
Hourly services and the minimum balance
Hourly Min Balance in Settings → Billing → Credit Settings (shipped as 5 in your base currency) is the balance a client must already hold before they can place an order for an hourly-billed product. Below it, checkout is refused with a message naming both the required minimum and their current balance.
Once running, an hourly service is suspended when the balance can no longer cover the next hour’s charge, after a short grace period. The suspension email tells the client their balance and the minimum, and points them at the portal to top up. Topping up releases the service again. Automatic credit top-up, described above, exists to keep this from happening at all.
When a balance-only payment will not go through
If your company requires customers to store their payment method at checkout, that requirement applies to the payment step itself. With some payment providers, storing an instrument is only possible when the customer pays with a card — so a customer who tries to pay from a balance they hold with that provider, rather than with a card, can be rejected at the provider’s own page and sent back without completing.
The symptom: a client reports that the payment page refuses to finish, or returns them to your portal unpaid, even though they have funds available with the provider. Their document stays unpaid and no payment record appears against it.
What to do:
- Ask the client to complete the payment with a card instead, or with another of your enabled methods.
- Or settle it yourself: if they hold credit with you, open the document and use Pay with Credit; otherwise record the payment against the document once it has reached you another way.
- If this happens repeatedly with the same provider, review whether your company needs to insist on stored payment methods for every checkout, or whether offering an additional payment method solves it. Both are decided in Settings → Billing and Settings → Payment Gateways.
Related articles
- Billing Settings — credit limits, VAT on top-ups, automatic credit application and automatic top-up.
- Client Details — the Credits tab and the currency change.
- Consolidated Monthly Invoicing — how top-ups behave when a month is invoiced as one document.
- Invoice Details and Proforma Details — applying credit to a single document.
- Invoices & Payments — what the client sees.
- Payment Gateways — the methods a top-up can be paid with.