How invoices, receipts, and payments relate

This page explains how the three billing documents in MapleGather — invoices, payments, and receipts — relate to each other and when each one is created.

How it works

MapleGather uses three distinct billing documents: invoices, payments, and receipts. Each serves a different purpose and appears at a different stage of the billing process.

The three documents

An invoice is a request for payment. It lists what is owed, by whom, and by when. It has a status: Draft, Sent, Paid, Partially paid, Overdue, Voided, or Refunded. The invoice is the billing record that an org sends to a member.

A payment is a record of money changing hands. It has a status: Pending, Succeeded, Failed, Refunded, Partially refunded, or Disputed. A payment is created when a charge attempt is made, whether by the member at checkout, by the admin manually recording offline cash, or by a subscription auto-renewal.

A receipt is a confirmation that a payment succeeded. It is a read-only document sent to the member via email and available for download from their billing portal. Receipts are generated automatically — you don’t create them manually.

How they connect

One invoice can have one or more payments applied to it. The most common flow:

A membership signup triggers MapleGather to generate a Draft invoice.
The member goes to checkout and pays. MapleGather creates a Pending payment.
Stripe confirms the charge. The payment becomes Succeeded.
MapleGather marks the invoice as Paid and fires a receipt to the member.

When an invoice has a balance paid by multiple payments (for example, a partial offline payment followed by a card payment for the remainder), each payment is linked to the same invoice.

What happens on a refund

When a payment is refunded, the payment status changes to Refunded (or Partially refunded for partial refunds), and the invoice status updates accordingly. A refund receipt fires to the member automatically — unless an admin suppresses it.

Voiding an invoice does not automatically refund any linked payment. If you void a paid invoice, you must separately process a refund for the payment if you want to return funds to the member.

Receipts vs. invoices: what the member sees

Members can download both their invoices (what was owed) and their receipts (confirmation that payment was received) from their billing portal. The receipt is the document most members want to keep for their own records. The invoice is available for situations where a member or their employer needs the original billing document, for example for reimbursement.

Manually recorded payments

Manual payments (cash, check, bank transfer) follow the same model as card payments:

A payment record is created and linked to the invoice.
When the admin marks the payment as received, the invoice updates to Paid and a receipt fires to the member (unless suppressed).
Manual payments don’t go through Stripe, so there’s no Stripe payment ID — they exist only in MapleGather’s records.