Payment emails

Where parents pay you through somebody else's system — a council payment portal, for instance — that system emails you each payment it takes. Payment Emails reads those emails and turns them into receipts against the right invoices.

Where to find it: Business Management > Payment Emails

Nothing appears here until a mail rule is set up

The screen is on the menu for everybody, but it only ever shows emails that a mail rule has identified as payments. Until one is set up for your payment provider the list is empty, and that is the screen working correctly rather than a fault. Mail rules are set up for you — ask support, and have an example of the email your provider sends.

What a mail rule does

A mail rule says this sender, optionally with this text in the subject, is this kind of email. Xperios checks the rules before it tries to match the email to a person, so an email from a payment system is set aside as a payment instead of being filed against whoever happens to share its name.

The kind of email matters because each one is read by code written for that provider's layout. What it reads becomes money, so a provider is only supported once its format has been written and tested.

Reviewing a payment

Each email arrives with what was read out of it and a list of the unpaid invoices it most likely pays. You can search for a different invoice, and split one payment across more than one.

The invoices are suggested by matching the child's name, not by any reference in the email. That is deliberate: a payment provider's own reference numbers mean nothing in Xperios, and taking them at face value lands money on the wrong invoice — a provider's "invoice 11541" turned out to be a completely unrelated Xperios invoice from two years earlier. So the suggestion is a shortlist for a person to agree, never an automatic posting.

Accept posts the money exactly as Post Receipt does, and files the email on the payer's Journal so there is a record of where the receipt came from.

Each email is accepted once, and only once

Accept cannot be run twice on the same email, and the same payment cannot be reviewed twice even if the provider sends it again. You cannot double-post a payment from here.

Emails from a sender that could not be verified

If the mail server could not confirm an email really came from where it says, the email is flagged rather than hidden. Read it, but treat what it says as a claim: an email dressed up as a payment notification is an obvious way to try to get money posted to the wrong account. If a flagged email looks at all wrong, leave it and ask support.

Shared mailboxes

Payment notifications normally arrive in a shared mailbox rather than one person's. Xperios can read a shared mailbox you already send from, using the signed-in person's own permissions — your mail system decides who may open it, and Xperios does not change that. Connecting your own mailbox asks for nothing new.

See also

• Debtors — the ledger the receipt is posted to
• Payment schedules — instalments, which are a different thing entirely from these one-off payments