🎟️ Vouchers

Sometimes you owe somebody money and both of you would rather it came back as credit than as a bank transfer: a referrer who is a private individual, a customer you are making something up to, a returned order you agreed to settle as credit rather than cash.

Vouchers is where that credit lives. Each one is an amount, in one currency, belonging to one named person or company, and it can be spent against their own invoices until it runs out.

The one thing worth understanding first

A voucher is not a discount. When one is spent, the invoice keeps its full price and its full VAT, and the voucher settles part of it — exactly as a bank transfer would. On screen you will see a payment on that invoice, made with the payment method "Voucher".

That is not a technicality. If a voucher lowered the price instead, the sale would be recorded as smaller than it was, the VAT on it would come out lower, and the income the beneficiary earned would disappear from the record at the same time. Recording it as a payment keeps both facts straight: the sale was the size it was, and the beneficiary was paid.

For the same reason a voucher is not a credit note either. A credit note reverses a sale; nothing here is being reversed.

Switching it on

Configuration → Vouchers. It ships off, and while it is off nothing can be issued and nothing can be spent.

On the same page:

• Expiry, in days — 0 means no expiry, which is what it ships as. A deadline is a commercial decision, so we do not invent one for you.
• On expiry, the amount is still owed — on by default. When a voucher lapses the balance goes back to being payable the ordinary way instead of being kept. You can turn that off, but keeping somebody's money should be a decision somebody made.
• VAT classification — settlement instrument, single-purpose or multi-purpose voucher. You and your accountant declare this; the product does not guess it, because the three are taxed at different moments and which one applies depends on what you sell.

Before the first redemption: where it posts

Switching the module on creates a payment method called Voucher. Link it to a financial account on Setup → Payment Modes, the one that represents what you owe in vouchers.

Until you do, redemption is refused and the card says so. That refusal is deliberate: without the link the system would post the redemption to your bank account, and your bank balance would slowly drift away from your statement by the total of every voucher ever spent — with nothing on any screen ever looking wrong.

If you do not use the accounting module at all, none of this applies: the payment is recorded and nothing is posted anywhere.

Issuing one

Vouchers → Issue a voucher. Choose who it belongs to — a customer, an economic partner, or a private individual who is in neither list — then the amount and the currency.

You get a code like V-KLTX-WDQK-FE59. The letters and digits that get misread over the telephone (O and 0, I and 1, S and 5) are not all in it at once, so a beneficiary reading it out to you gets it right.

Spending one

Open the voucher and choose one of the beneficiary's unpaid invoices. Leave the amount empty to apply as much as fits — the smaller of what is left on the voucher and what the invoice still owes.

• Currencies are never converted. A voucher in one currency cannot be spent on an invoice in another; you get a refusal rather than a silent exchange rate.
• One voucher can pay parts of several invoices, and several vouchers can pay one invoice.
• Two people cannot spend the same voucher at once. The second one waits and then sees what is really left.

What the voucher page shows

Every change is listed: issued, redeemed, expired, cancelled — with the amount and the invoice it went to. That list is the record; the "remaining" figure is a running total of it. If the two ever disagree, the page says so in red and the Health page reports it, because a balance nothing checks can be wrong for a long time.

Cancelling and expiring

Cancel the remaining balance closes what is left, with a reason. Redemptions already made stay exactly as they were — a cancellation is not an erasure.

Expiry runs by itself daily, and you can run it by hand from the vouchers list. It reports how many lapsed and how much was released.

What is not built yet

Issuing a voucher automatically when a referral commission is settled is the next step; today a voucher is issued by hand from this screen. Everything above works and is used the same way either way.