Importing Payments
- Former user (Deleted)
- Panagiotis Papanastasiou
- Athanasia Kourti
You can import payments from excel spreadsheets directly into Cloud BSS using our payments importer. The Payments Importer is accessible through “Payments” menu in “Billing” module.
Payments Importer
The importer is a 3-steps wizard. The 1st step is to select the excel file that contains your payment records, the 2nd to match the columns of your payment records, and the 3rd to monitor import results.
The imports are performed asynchronously, and the user will be able to review at any time the import log.
- 1st step – Select your file.This step displays an option for the user to select the excel file that includes the payments. The supported formats are “.xlsx” and ".xls". When the system parses the excel file, the available sheets of that excel file will be displayed to the user for selecting which sheet contains the payment records.
- 2nd step – Payments Fields.This is the step where the customer must match the excel columns to payments fields. There are 2 sets of fields:
- Identifiers. In BSS, a payment can be related only to an account or with one or more invoices. In this section, the user must define which excel column will be used for identifying the customer/invoice. There is no need to define both identifiers, but at least one must be defined.
- Payments Fields. This section displays to the user the options for matching Amount / Payment Date / Transaction ID / Type. As a good practice, it is best to match all the Payment Fields, even if some are mandatory.
- 3rd step – Import Log.This is the last step of the wizard. The user is redirected to the 3rd step of the wizard for reviewing the import progress. The import is asynchronous, and the user from this page can view the import log. This page reloads every 5 seconds the import log.
Validation Rules for Payment Records
For a payment record to be imported successfully, the following rules must be met:
- If an account identifier has been specified, its value must correspond to an account that is enabled for ordering in Cloud BSS.
- If the invoice identifier is not empty, its value must correspond to a debit unpaid invoice.
- If invoice identifier columns include more than one identifier, rule 2 must be true for all identifiers.
- At least one account or invoice identifier must exist.
- If both identifiers are in place, then the invoice(s) identifier(s) must correspond to customer invoices.
- The amount must be a positive numeric field.
- The date must be equal to or greater than the import submission date.
- The payment type must be valid and not related to a payment gateway. We don’t allow the import of payments that have been generated from payment gateways like PayPal because, in this case, the payment is automatically added to the Cloud BSS when we get a payment confirmation from the gateway.
Import Outcome
The outcome of the import is a list of successfully imported payments that are related to the correspondent accounts and/or invoices.
- If a payment is related to a specific invoice, the status of this invoice will be set to “paid” if the payment amount covers the unpaid invoice. Otherwise, the invoice will still be unpaid, but its unpaid amount would have decreased by the payment amount.
- If a payment is not related to a specific invoice but only to a customer, then the system will set as “paid” all customer’s unpaid invoices that are covered by the imported payment record. The invoices that will close first are the oldest invoices, and the system will continue with the most recent invoices until the payment amount.
Managing Failed Records
If some of the payment records fail to be imported, the user can re-import them from the payments import details page. On this page, there is a section with the failed records where the customer can review the errors, correct them and re-run the import process for these records.
Deleting a Payments Import
Users can delete an import from the available action on the payments import details page. By deleting an import, the system will:
- Delete all the payments that had been created from the import action.
- “Re-open” all the invoices that had been set as paid.