Settling Partner Balances

Some partners never pay invoice by invoice. They pay a balance: one transfer covers several invoices at once, credit notes reduce what is owed, and every so often a round sum arrives on account. Automatic matching cannot help here. It looks for a payment that corresponds to an invoice, and for these partners no such pair exists.

Settlement is where you allocate a partner's payments against its invoices yourself, with the AI proposing a starting point.

When to Use It

Reach for Settlement when a partner shows a long list of open items that never clears, and the payments do not look like any single invoice. Typically:

• a supplier you pay weekly or monthly in one transfer covering several deliveries
• a partner whose credit notes (returns, corrections) are deducted from the next payment rather than refunded
• round, on-account payments: an advance, or a customer simply paying "something towards the balance"
• a platform that pays out once for sales invoiced to more than one partner

If a payment matches one invoice, you do not need Settlement. Ordinary invoice matching already handles that, and handles it automatically.

Settlement needs the permission "Manage matching", which accountants hold. Clients do not see the tab.

Opening a Settlement

Go to Matching → Settlement, then pick:

• the partner whose balance you are settling. You can select more than one, up to 20, and you should when their documents settle together. The usual case is platform sales: the invoices are issued partly to the platform and partly to a private-person partner, but a single payout pays for all of them, so neither partner alone explains the money.
• the currency. One settlement covers one currency.

Press Open settlement.

Two things happen at that moment, and both matter:

• The records are claimed straight away. Every payment and every invoice in scope is set aside for this session, which is what takes them out of automatic matching. It also means a record already held by another open session stops you: the app says one of these records is already open in another settlement session.
• The period is fixed. The session takes the date filter that was set on the Matching page when you opened it, and keeps it. The header shows it next to the currency.

The two sides of the workbench are deliberately not symmetric: the period bounds the payments, while the invoice side shows everything still open up to the end of the period. A July payment routinely settles a June invoice, and each pane also has its own filter on top of that.

Reading the Panes

The number on a row is not always the document's amount. It is what a settlement you put together could allocate: what is still open, plus whatever the existing matches on it hold, because committing your group removes those matches. A payment whose bank amount is fully consumed by a wrong match can still show its whole value, and the row says so with incl. … to re-allocate.

That is the point of the workbench: pulling such a document into a group you build replaces its existing matches in the same act, and when one of them was approved by a person you confirm it first. The AI works the other way round: it never counts a match a person approved as free capacity, and a settlement it proposes never removes one.

Other badges you will meet: Already matched on a payment or an invoice that is fully settled (they stay listed so a wrong allocation can be undone), Partly paid on an invoice, and No invoice needed on a payment.

Search narrows nothing. Typing in a pane's search box highlights the matches and dims the rest, but never hides a row, because a row you cannot see is a row you cannot untick. Digits match the start of a number, a word matches anywhere, and accents are ignored. If a pane filter is hiding rows you have ticked, the pane says so and those rows still count in the balance.

Shift+click ticks every row between the last one you clicked and this one.

Letting the AI Propose

Propose settlement asks the AI to work out which payments settle which invoices. It explains each group in a sentence: an exact invoice number found in a bank reference, an exact netted amount, or oldest-invoices-first when nothing else distinguishes them.

Nothing is written at this point. Every proposal is a suggestion you review, change or discard. Note that proposing replaces the groups you have built by hand, so propose first and adjust afterwards.

If neither pane has a filter, AI Finance Team asks you to confirm before it looks at everything the session's period allows. Over about 300 records it declines and asks you to narrow the period.

If the AI itself is unavailable, the proposal still arrives, built from the deterministic rules alone, and says so.

Building One Yourself

Tick the payments and the invoices that belong together. The strip along the top keeps a running total:

A credit note counts as a negative amount, because it reduces what the payment has to cover.

When the difference reaches zero the strip shows Nets to zero. Small rounding is allowed: 10 HUF, or 0.05 in any other currency.

Press Group selection to turn the selection into a proposed settlement. The allocation inside a group follows a fixed order: credit notes are applied whole to the earliest selected payment, then each invoice is filled from the payments in date order, splitting an invoice across payments where no single one covers it. Whatever is left simply stays open.

A group shows both sides of what it leaves behind, deliberately: Leaves … unapplied on the payment side, … still open on the invoice on the other.

Committing

Each proposed settlement has its own Commit. Committing writes ordinary matches, exactly as if you had matched each invoice to its payment by hand, so the invoices become paid and the partner ledger updates.

If a settlement would replace pairings that already exist, the group says Breaks N existing. A settlement you built yourself replaces every pairing on its documents, and when one of them was approved by a person, you are asked to confirm and shown what will be removed. A settlement the AI proposed only replaces automatic pairings.

Committing also clears any pending match suggestions that name the records it allocated. Confirmed matches are never removed this way.

In the RLB export, a settled transaction is written per leg. A payment carrying two or more allocations produces one row per allocation, each naming its own settlement document, plus a row for any unallocated remainder, so the rows still add up to the amount on the bank statement. A credit-note leg books on the opposite side. A payment with a single allocation exports as one row, as before.

Changing Your Mind

Three different things undo three different amounts of work:

• Discard removes a proposed group. Nothing was written, so nothing is undone.
• Reject, on a group under Committed in this session, unlinks every leg of that settlement in one act and returns the documents to the panes.
• Unlink, in the Existing matches list, removes a single match. That list holds every match on the session's records, whoever made it and whenever, marked Approved by a person or Automatic, so it is also the way to undo a match made long before this session. Unlinking a human-approved match asks first.

Leaving Money Unapplied

A payment does not have to be fully allocated. If a customer pays a round 250,000 against 180,000 of invoices, allocate the 180,000 and leave the rest. The transaction is then partly allocated, and the unapplied 70,000 shows on the partner ledger as money received but not yet assigned, which is exactly what it is.

Never invent an allocation to make a payment balance. An honest remainder is more useful than a tidy but wrong settlement.

Closing the Session

Press Close session when you are finished, so the records return to normal handling. Sessions do not expire on their own, and an open one keeps holding its records out of automatic matching.

Open sessions are listed on the Settlement tab with the number of records each one holds, and the Matching overview shows a banner while any session is open.

Things Worth Knowing

• A payment in a session is marked on its own page. A transaction held by a settlement shows a Continue settlement link back to the session. Invoices carry no such marker.
• You can also arrive from a match. Where a record is over-allocated or has competing claims, its related activity offers Settle against partner.
• Record names are links. Clicking an invoice number or a payment opens it in a preview over the workbench, so you can check the details without losing the settlement you are building. Hold Cmd (Ctrl on Windows) while you click to open the full page in a new tab instead.
• What the app refuses: more than one currency in a group, allocating more than a document is worth, and more than 20 partners in one scope.