Recording Cash, Check & Other Manual Payments

Not every payment comes through online checkout. A client hands you a check at the shoot, a brokerage pays by bank transfer, an agent sends money over Venmo. Spatiko doesn’t pretend those payments don’t exist — you record them on the order, and everything downstream catches up: the payment status, the balance, and the download gate.

Where you record a payment

Open the order. The Billing card shows the running balance, and while there’s money owed, a Record payment button next to it. The same button sits on each open invoice’s page — record wherever you happen to be looking.

The same card has a Payment history link, so you can see every payment already on the order — online and manual — before you record another one.

Recording payments follows your team’s roles and permissions: anyone allowed to manage invoices can do it.

What you enter

Record Payment opens a short form:

• Amount — whatever the client actually paid. The form shows the amount due, with a one-click shortcut to apply the full outstanding balance.
• Method — card, bank transfer, cash, check, or external for anything else (Venmo, Zelle, and the like).
• Type — usually an order payment. You can also label a payment as a deposit or a tip.
• Reference number — appears when the method is check or bank transfer, so you can keep the check number or wire reference with the payment.
• Notes — optional, for anything worth remembering later.

The payment is dated the moment you record it and counts immediately — there’s no pending state or confirmation step for manual payments.

How a payment lands on invoices

You don’t allocate money by hand. A recorded payment is applied to the order’s open invoices oldest-due-first, so the longest-standing debt clears first. Record it against a specific invoice — from that invoice’s page, or with the Apply to invoice picker that appears when an order has invoices for more than one payer — and that invoice is settled first, with any overflow rolling to the next oldest due.

One check covering several invoices is therefore one recording, not three: the amount spreads itself. Tips are the exception — a tip is never applied to an invoice, so recording one can’t accidentally shrink a balance.

Partial payments

You don’t have to wait for the full amount. If a client pays part of the balance, record exactly what they paid: the order’s payment status moves to partial, and the remainder stays on the order as the amount due. Record the rest whenever it arrives — each payment is listed separately in the payment history, and once the balance reaches zero the order flips to paid.

What recording a payment does

• Payment status updates instantly. The order recalculates as soon as you save — partial if a balance remains, paid when it’s settled. See how invoices work for the full status list.
• Gated media unlocks. If the order uses pay-to-download, full-resolution downloads open the moment the order is paid. The gate follows payment status, not payment method — cash unlocks it just like a card payment.
• The order’s activity feed logs it — method, amount, and who recorded it — so there’s a clear trail of when the money came in and who entered it.

Recording a cash tip

If a client tips you in cash at the shoot, record it on the order with the type set to Tip. Tips recorded this way flow into photographer payouts, attributed to the order’s primary photographer — the one on the earliest assigned session. In a solo business, that’s you.

Clients can also add a tip when they pay online, without you recording anything.

Where this fits

Manual payments are the fallback that keeps every payment timing honest: even without Stripe connected, an order set to pay-on-delivery stays locked until you record the payment. For the full picture of how money moves through a shoot, start with getting paid.

Go deeper

• Refunding a client — give back a payment you recorded and keep the order’s balance straight.
• Managing an order — adjust line items, discounts, and travel fees before you take the money.
• Sales tax on photography invoices — what the balance you’re collecting is actually made up of.
• Importing past orders from a CSV — bring old orders and what was already paid on them across from another platform.
• Revenue and service performance reports — see collected versus booked revenue once the payments are logged.