Record payments and answer money questions without leaving Foreman

Foreman had no path to a JobTread payment at all. You could not record money received, fix a payment you entered wrong, ask what a job had collected, or find cash sitting on an account with nothing applied to it. All of that now works from chat.

The money questions are answered by JobTread itself rather than by pulling every payment out and adding them up, so a year of cash flow comes back in one round trip and the totals are the same ones JobTread shows.

Tell Foreman the amount, the date the money moved, and who it came from or went to. Money received from a customer is a credit; money you paid out to a vendor is a debit. You can also give it a memo, how it was paid - Check 1042, Wire, ACH - and your own reference number from your accounting system.

One thing to be clear about, because it is the most common misunderstanding: a payment in JobTread is recorded against the customer or vendor account, not against one invoice. Recording it does not close out an open invoice. JobTread has an automatic matching option that Foreman leaves on, but in live testing it did not allocate against open invoices even when the amounts matched exactly - it appears to be for matching bank and card-processor feeds. Foreman tells you what actually happened and never claims an invoice is paid when it is not. Applying a payment to a specific invoice is done on the invoice itself in JobTread.

You can change a payment's amount, the date it was paid, which account it belongs to, how it was paid, the reference number and the memo. What you cannot change after the fact is whether it is money in or money out - JobTread locks the payment type at creation, and so does the link to an outside accounting record. If one of those is wrong, delete the payment and record it again.

Deleting a payment also removes anything it was applied to, which re-opens those invoice balances. Foreman deletes it and then reads it back to confirm it is actually gone rather than assuming the request worked. JobTread itself may refuse to delete a payment that is already applied; if it does, you will see that refusal in plain terms.

Pull up a single payment and you get the whole picture: the amount, how much of it has been applied and how much is still sitting unapplied, and exactly which invoices it was allocated to - and therefore which jobs it touched.

You can also search across payments with real filters rather than scrolling: by account, by credit or debit, by how it was paid, by your own reference number, by date range, only the ones with money still unapplied, or only the ones that have or have not been linked to QuickBooks. Along with the rows you get the count and dollar total of everything that matched, not just the page you are looking at.

Ask what you have been paid over any window and you get the count, the total, the average payment size, the first and last payment dates, and how much of it is still unapplied. The same filters that narrow a payment search narrow the totals, so you can ask the question about one customer, one payment method, or one quarter.

For cash flow over time, ask for it grouped by day, month or year. JobTread computes the buckets and Foreman reports them, which means the answer is the same whether you have forty payments or forty thousand.

Ask for a job's money picture and you get contract value, invoiced to date, collected, outstanding, what you have committed to vendors, vendor bills, and the payments actually applied to that job's invoices - plus a breakdown by document type and status so you can see where the numbers come from.

Draft documents are kept out of the headline figures on purpose, because a draft estimate is not a contract and a draft invoice has not been sent. They are still reported alongside, so you can see the difference between what is real and what is in progress.

Because JobTread payments live on the customer account rather than the job, the job-level payment figure is built from what has been applied to that job's own invoices. A payment sitting unapplied on the customer's account will not show as collected on the job until it is applied - which is usually the explanation when a job looks unpaid but you know the money came in.

The same picture for one customer or vendor across every job: invoiced, collected, outstanding, how many payments they have made, the first and last payment dates, and how much credit is sitting on their account with nothing applied to it. It also tells you whether that account is linked to QuickBooks.

The unapplied figure is the one worth watching. It is money you already have that is not showing against any invoice - the usual cause of a customer who looks behind on paper but is not.

When a payable ends up with a negative balance - you over-paid a vendor, or they credited you - Foreman can close it out. You choose what happens to the money: keep it as a credit on that vendor's account, or record that it came back to you as a refund.

This one targets the payable document with the negative balance, not a payment record, so point Foreman at the vendor bill in question. Note that this path was built and validated but never fired against a live negative payable, because producing one safely in a test account was not possible.

QuickBooks sync is JobTread's own feature, not something Foreman drives. What Foreman gives you is honest visibility into it: whether the connection is live, whether it is paused, whether it is pointed at a sandbox company instead of your real books, when it last reconciled, and what its default accounts and tax codes are.

You can also ask what has and has not made it across. Foreman counts how many payments, accounts, jobs, cost codes, time entries, documents and invoice allocations carry a QuickBooks link and how many do not, along with the dollar value of the payments that have never synced. That is the fastest way to find accounting drift before month-end - a paused connection can sit quietly for months while the money keeps coming in.

Changing QuickBooks configuration is deliberately not something Foreman will do. Those settings are organization-wide accounting plumbing, and a wrong value there mis-links or severs sync for every account in the company. Foreman reads that state and reports it; you change it in JobTread.

Foreman can pull the audit trail on payments: who created, changed or deleted one, when, from what IP address, and the full before-and-after of the record. You can look at everything recently, or narrow to a single payment.

There is a real limit here that is worth stating plainly. JobTread records creations and deletions with the full record, so those can be attributed with certainty. Change events record only the fields that changed, with no record id attached - so when you ask about a specific payment, Foreman separates the events it can prove belong to that payment from the changes that merely happened during its lifetime. It labels them as possible rather than pretending to be sure.

If a money question ever comes back as a permission error, Foreman can ask JobTread directly whether your connection is allowed to read that particular record - which is usually faster than guessing at the account's role settings.

If you use JobTread's website tracking, Foreman can list the visitors it has captured, newest first, with their lead score, contact details, the message they left and the campaign attribution that brought them in. You can narrow to visitors above a score, to a date range, or to the ones who left an email address.