When an invoice receives a partial payment, record the cash as an observed receipt, reduce the invoice to its verified remaining open balance, and rebuild the collection assumption only for that residual. Never carry the original full invoice amount forward, and never treat the remaining balance as automatically collectible in the same week.

Microsoft's receivables documentation states that a partial payment can partially settle an invoice while the invoice remains open with a balance. Intuit's current QuickBooks guidance says to record the amount actually paid against the selected open invoice. Stripe's partial-payment documentation likewise distinguishes invoice payment status from the remaining amount. Product behavior varies, so the authorized accounting source remains the controlling record for an AR Pulse review.

Preserve three separate facts

For each partially paid invoice, retain:

  • the original invoice amount;
  • the recorded receipt amount and date;
  • the remaining open balance as of the new report cutoff.

Do not replace these with one net number. The three facts let a reviewer see what changed, reconcile actual cash, and avoid double counting. If the payment is visible in a bank feed but is not yet linked to the invoice in the accounting source, treat it as a reconciliation exception rather than allocating it from memory.

Use a four-state residual review

Classify the remaining balance before assigning a new forecast week:

  1. **Expected residual:** Current evidence supports that the customer intends to pay the remainder, with a dated reviewable timing signal.
  2. **Conditional residual:** The remainder depends on a named approval, correction, installment event, or other condition.
  3. **Disputed or deducted residual:** The customer has identified a reason the full balance may not be paid as invoiced.
  4. **Unconfirmed residual:** The invoice remains open, but no current evidence supports a collection week.

These states describe evidence, not accounting treatment and not payment probability. A controller or bookkeeper should decide how the transaction is recorded in the source system.

Rebuild the weekly assumption

Close the original forecast outcome using the actual receipt date and amount. Mark whether the receipt was in the assigned week, early, or late. Then create a new assumption for the verified residual instead of editing the prior amount.

Record the new expected week, evidence date, evidence detail, internal owner, next action, and review date. If the residual is disputed, short paid, or unsupported, keep it outside the expected weekly total until the evidence changes. The short-paid invoice framework provides a separate decision path when the difference may be a deduction rather than a planned installment.

Handle successive partial receipts without double counting

When two or more receipts arrive against the same invoice, keep one event row per observed payment and one current invoice row for the residual. Recalculate the remaining balance from the accounting source at each cutoff; do not subtract a bank transaction again when QuickBooks already reflects it in the open amount.

For every receipt, preserve payment date, applied amount, invoice reference, and source status. Close the prior forecast assumption only for the observed amount. Then decide whether the residual retains its old evidence, moves to a later week, becomes conditional, or stays unassigned. A series of partial payments may show progress, but it does not by itself prove the timing of the final amount.

Reconcile before rolling forward

A partial receipt can appear in several states while systems are updated: recorded and applied, recorded but unapplied, pending, or absent from the accounting snapshot. Use the cash-receipt cutoff to decide which receipts belong in actuals for the completed period. Use the unapplied-payment guide when cash is observed but its invoice relationship is unresolved.

For each review, verify customer, invoice identifier, original amount, receipt date, applied amount, open amount, and report date. If those fields do not reconcile, pause the invoice-level timing decision and assign an internal validation owner.

The decision rule

A partial payment creates two decisions, not one. The received portion is actual cash. The residual is a new open-balance question that needs current evidence before it enters a forecast week. Keeping those decisions separate protects the forecast from stale full-invoice assumptions and unsupported carry-forwards.

AR Pulse analyzes a customer-provided QuickBooks receivables export and returns a ranked cash-action list plus a four-week collections forecast. It does not connect to QuickBooks, change accounting records, contact customers, or guarantee collections. View the synthetic one-page example.