How do season payments and overrides work?
The season columns on your Customers list are the money view of winter: one cell per property per service season, telling you exactly where each stands. Most cells fill themselves in from the quote flow — the overrides exist for everything that happens off-screen: cash at the door, a handshake deal, a correction.
Reading a cell
A cell shows Unpaid, Paid, or Paid with the method — Card, Cash, Cheque, or E-transfer. Customers with several properties roll up to a paid count like “2/3 paid”; each property still tracks its own cell underneath. Payments are keyed per property and service, so snow and lawn keep separate columns and two driveways never blur together.
Cells bind to real invoices
When a quote is accepted, its invoice is attributed to the season it covers; when that invoice is paid, the cell flips on its own with the actual method. A cell that says Paid · Card is backed by a settled invoice you can open — it’s bookkeeping, not a checkbox.
The Record payment menu is your override
Click an unpaid cell and Record payment offers the honest paths first: Pay the open invoice (recording the amount and method), or Accept the outstanding quote on the customer’s behalf. Card isn’t offered manually — card payments only ever arrive through the online checkout.
An offline sale still becomes a real record
Sold a season face to face — cash at the door, a cheque, an e-transfer? Pick the service, type the amount you collected, and SnowTracker writes the whole thing down for you: a quote showing what you sold, an invoice for it, and the payment settling it. That’s why the amount is required. A cell that says Paid always has something behind it now, so your revenue reporting, next season’s renewal prices and your route values all agree with your pocket.
Recording a payment doesn’t email the customer
Money you collected in person is already settled between you, so nothing goes out by default. If you do want customers to get a receipt when you record a payment yourself, turn on “Receipts for payments you record yourself” in Settings → Notifications. Receipts for online card payments are unaffected — those always send.
Cash sits pending until you confirm it
A customer who chose cash or e-transfer at checkout leaves the invoice open and the cell unpaid on purpose. When the money actually arrives, record it here — that’s the moment the cell flips and the books agree with your pocket.
Undo is one click
Marked the wrong cell? Mark unpaid reverses it. The cell goes back to tracking reality.
The pipeline that fills these cells automatically is “What happens when a customer accepts a quote?” — and the invoices behind them are covered in “How do invoices work?”.