Partial payment

Partial payments are ordinary life in customer and supplier accounts, and they have many causes. Amounts spread over instalments for cash-flow reasons, invoices where one disputed line is held back and the rest is paid, contractual retention on progress billing, items offset against a credit note, and the tax portion not collected in cash on documents subject to Turkish VAT withholding (tevkifat, a domestic rule that has the buyer pay part of the VAT straight to the tax office) all produce a receipt smaller than the invoice. The effect is the same in each case: the invoice stays open in the ledger even though part of it has been settled. An open item list is therefore not a list of invoices; every line carries an original amount, an applied amount and a remaining amount, and losing any one of the three loses the story of the account.

In reconciliation, partial payments break one-to-one matching. One payment can be split across several invoices, one invoice can be closed by several payments, and in practice both happen at once. Even when the totals agree, the two sides may have recorded different answers to the question of which payment covered which part of which invoice. iFinances therefore splits payments during matching, distributes bulk payments across invoices, works with a cents-level tolerance, and converts foreign currency items at the official central bank rate. Each match carries a written reason showing which amount was applied to which invoice, and the decision to close a line stays with a person.

The common mistake is to read every short receipt as underpayment. A collection smaller than the invoice does not automatically mean the debt is unpaid: transfer fees, correspondent bank charges, exchange differences and withholding can all leave a legitimately smaller amount in the account. When such differences are not labelled with a tolerance and a reason, small but permanent open items pile up, aging reports distort, and collections chases invoices that were in fact paid. The opposite mistake exists too. Treating a genuine partial payment as within tolerance and closing the invoice writes off real money without anyone deciding to. The safe habit is to keep the remainder visible and record why it is there.