Client Paid Half Your Invoice? How to Track Part Payments Properly

You raise an invoice for ₹1,18,000. Two weeks later ₹50,000 lands in your account with a note saying the rest will follow after delivery. Nothing about that is unusual — Indian B2B runs on advances, milestones and part payments.

But open most invoicing tools and you get one switch: paid or unpaid. Neither is true. Mark it paid and you've told yourself ₹68,000 you haven't received is in the bank. Leave it unpaid and that invoice sits in your pending list looking identical to one where the client hasn't sent a rupee.

Why the paid/unpaid switch fails

The switch isn't just imprecise, it actively costs you money in three places:

• You chase the wrong number. The follow-up message says ₹1,18,000 when the client owes ₹68,000. That's an awkward call, and it makes you look like you aren't tracking your own books.
• Your outstanding total is wrong. Every part-paid invoice counts at full value in "pending", so the figure you use to decide whether you can afford something is inflated.
• You lose the detail. Which date did the ₹50,000 come? By UPI or NEFT? What was the reference? That's the information you need when a client says "we already paid that" six weeks later.

What a part payment actually needs to record

A payment isn't a flag, it's an event. Each one carries its own facts:

	Why it matters
Amount	The only way the balance can be right
Date	Tells you how long the rest has been outstanding
Mode	Bank transfer, UPI, cash, cheque, card
Reference	The UTR or cheque number you'll need if it's ever disputed

Record those and the balance stops being something you work out in your head. It's just the invoice total minus everything that's come in.

Recording one in CredHill

Open View Invoices, find the invoice, and click Payments. Enter what you received, the date and the mode, and save. The amount field is pre-filled with whatever is still outstanding, because settling in full is the common case — edit it down when it's a part payment.

Do that twice, three times, five times. Each receipt is stored separately with its own date and reference, and the invoice keeps a running total of everything settled against it.

What changes once an invoice is part-paid

Three things start behaving correctly:

The status becomes honest. Instead of paid or unpaid, a part-paid invoice shows as Partially Paid, with the balance under it. You can see at a glance that ₹68,000 is due on an invoice that isn't untouched.

Your dashboard stops lying. "Payment Received" counts the ₹50,000 you actually got. "Pending Payment" counts the ₹68,000 you're actually owed — not the full ₹1,18,000. The same correction flows into your customer ledger, so each client's outstanding balance is real.

Reminders ask for the right amount. The WhatsApp reminder on a part-paid invoice asks for the balance, not the original total. No more apologising for over-chasing a client who already paid most of it.

Fixing a mistake

Entered ₹5,000 when it was ₹50,000? Open Payments on that invoice and delete the entry — each receipt has its own delete button. The balance and status recompute immediately.

That's deliberately more granular than marking the whole invoice unpaid, which would wipe every receipt on it. Delete the one wrong entry and the other four stay intact.

The short version

• A paid/unpaid flag can't describe an invoice that's part-settled, and both answers are wrong.
• Record each payment as its own entry: amount, date, mode, reference.
• The balance, the status, the dashboard and the reminder text then all follow from the money that actually arrived.
• If a client also deducts TDS, that's part of the same settlement — here's how to record it.

Not tax advice. This is about tracking payments, not accounting treatment. How you recognise revenue and when you report it is a question for your chartered accountant.