Glossary
Partial payment
A payment that covers some but not all of an agreed fee, leaving a balance outstanding.
What it means
A partial payment is any amount received that is less than the full fee. For project work it is the normal case rather than an exception: advances, milestone payments and staged settlements are all partial payments.
They are worth naming because they are where simple billing records break. A system built around "paid or unpaid" cannot represent a client who has paid 70% of a fee, and forcing the situation into a binary either overstates what you have collected or understates it.
The right treatment is for each partial payment to be its own dated entry, with the paid total and balance derived from the set. That way a client who pays in five instalments is no harder to track than one who pays once.
A fee settled in three parts
An agreed fee of $50,000 is paid as $20,000 on signing, $10,000 at the first milestone and $5,000 later in the month.
Each is a partial payment. The client is neither paid nor unpaid — they are partially paid, with $35,000 received and $15,000 outstanding.
Recording them as three entries preserves the sequence, which shows at a glance that payments have slowed. A single "$35,000 paid" figure would hide that entirely.
Illustrative example. Names and amounts are made up.
How this works in Umikflow
- Partial payments are the default assumption: each entry is independent, and there is no limit on how many a client can have.
- A client with some payments but not the full fee is labelled Partially Paid automatically.
- A payment larger than the remaining balance is allowed — Umikflow warns that it exceeds the balance rather than blocking it, since overpayments genuinely happen.