With custom tools, payment management. Even your transactional payment management is another thing. Because most of the time with projects, you’re not essentially managing money. You might be managing a budget. But with operations, depending on the industry, you might be managing money, looking at vendors, looking at purchases, procurement, paying independent contractors. So you need a way to handle or manage payments. If you’re a service-based business or a consultancy, you’re looking for a way to check payments that have been processed and manage those payments, especially if they come in deposits or installments. You want to know how to manage payments.
I’m going to talk about a project I worked on for a coaching business. We wanted to track payments that came in from Stripe on a custom tool or software. I needed to reduce friction and reduce the need to input things manually and calculate them. We had a set of calculations. What did these calculations do? They looked at how payments were made. With this, you had the option to pay in full or in two to six installment payments. So we start with the initial amount. If a deposit was made, we move on to seeing how many installments this person agreed to pay in. Is it three installments? Four installment payments? Five installment payments? Or six installment payments? Then we divide the remaining amount by the number of installments they selected, and we have the installment amount that should be paid on the first of the month or the last of the month, depending on when the client agreed to pay.
Now, the only things that needed to be entered were the payment, the number of installments, and the initial deposit, because each package already had a fixed amount. So that’s not something they needed to update. You just select the package, add the initial deposit that this person agreed to, and then the number of installments. The system handles the rest. It tells you, “This is the installment payment that this person should make,” over however many months they selected. It picks out the dates, and then you can track everything from there. Now, the only thing that the operations person had to do was confirm when a payment had been received. They didn’t want a situation where Stripe told them, “This person made this payment,” and then they still had to come in and manually work everything out. Instead, they would simply come in and confirm that the payment had been made. They’d check a box saying that the first installment payment, the fourth installment payment, or whichever installment it was, had been completed. The system would automatically update the amount, leaving us with the total paid and the total remaining.