A wallet holds money a customer has already given you, before they have taken any goods. Deposits for a large order, change they asked you to keep, a running account for a regular buyer.
What the balance means
A wallet balance is money you owe the customer, not money you have earned. It only becomes revenue when they spend it on an order. The admin says this on the panel for a reason: it is easy to read a healthy wallet total as a good month.
The balance is not a number anyone types. It is the sum of every movement on the customer's ledger, so it always matches the history shown beneath it.
Taking a prepayment
- Open Customers and find the customer.
- Open their wallet panel.
- Enter the amount and a note saying what it is for. "Deposit towards the Kano install" is worth more in six months than "deposit".
The note appears on the ledger and on any statement the customer sees, so write it for them, not for yourself.
Spending it
Assign the customer to an order, then choose the wallet as the payment method. Two rules apply:
- A wallet payment is capped at what is still outstanding on the order, counting anything already paid by other methods. It will not overpay.
- If the balance is short, the wallet covers what it can and the rest is taken normally. You do not have to work out the split.
Correcting a mistake
A prepayment recorded in error can be reversed from the ledger. The reversal is a new entry, not a deletion, so the history still shows what happened and when. Nothing is silently removed.
Where wallets do not work
Wallets are deliberately absent from the offline tills. A till that has been offline cannot know the current balance, and two tills spending the same balance at once would overdraw it. Take wallet payments from the web admin.
The storefront also does not offer the wallet at checkout today.