How do I apply a credit balance if I don't use Zuora's Payment Runs?

Overview

When your customer sends you a payment for an amount over than the invoice, that's an overpayment.  There are lots of reasons why a customer would send an overpayment ranging from a simple mistake to forgetting that they did paid via an electronic method. 

Zuora's Credit Balance feature is a great way to store the overpayment so you can apply it to a future invoice or refund it to the customer.

There is even a feature to automatically apply the credit balance automatically as part of the Payment Run so you can use the credit balance before processing an electronic payment.

This is great if you process electronic payments, but what do you if you do not use electronic payments?

Solution

Zuora's Payment Run will automatically apply the Credit Balance to an invoice balance before attempting an electronic payment with the gateway.

If you do not use Zuora's Payment Runs, you can still apply the credit balance via APIs.

As a best practice, these APIs should be called before sending invoices to customers so that the invoice you send will have any Credit Balance applied.  If you choose to apply the credit balance after sending the invoice to the customer, the customer will not know that the credit balance was applied to this invoice.

From the data sources API, you can query the invoice data source for accounts with Total Invoice Balance greater than zero AND Credit Balance greater than zero AND Invoice with Invoice Balance greater than zero.  This query will yield an open invoice for any customer with a credit balance.  For more help about using the APIs, please refer to the Zuora API documentation.

The Create Credit Balance Adjustment API can then be called so you can apply the credit balance to the invoice balance.  From the initial data source query, you will get all invoices with open balances, so you can choose to apply the credit balance to the invoice of your choosing.  As a best practice, we recommend applying the credit balance to the oldest invoice first.

When applying the credit balance, we recommend that you consider the use case where your credit balance is greater than your invoice balance:

• If the credit balance is greater than the invoice balance, apply the invoice balance amount
• If the credit balance is less than the invoice balance, apply the full credit balance

Now that the Credit Balance is applied, you can send invoices as appropriate.

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