Billing settings and credit, not invoices themselves
The Billing tab is easy to misread as "this patient's billing," as in their invoices and payments. It's narrower and more specific than that: it holds the patient's billing settings — the configuration that shapes how billing behaves for this particular patient — and their credit history, a record of credit added to or drawn down from their account. Actual invoices and payments live on their own tabs and in the main billing tools, linked at the end of this article.
Getting this distinction right matters in practice: staff sometimes land here looking for a specific unpaid invoice and are confused not to find one. If that's what you're after, this isn't the wrong tab because of a bug — it's simply a different part of the patient's financial picture.
- How the billing settings card switches between View and Edit layouts
- What a credit balance discrepancy banner means, when it appears, and what to actually do about it
- What the credit history section shows, and what an empty account looks like
- Where to go to create invoices or record payments for this patient
Billing settings: View and Edit
The billing settings card has two layouts, and only one is visible at a time. It opens in a read-only View layout that summarizes the patient's current billing settings at a glance. Clicking Edit swaps in a form with the same fields made editable, so you're never looking at a half-editable, half-static view — it's clearly one or the other.
Click Edit
On the billing settings card, click Edit to switch from the View layout to the editable form.
Update the fields
Make your changes in the form.
Save or cancel
Click Save to apply your changes and return to the View layout, or Cancel to discard them and return to View unchanged.
When the numbers don't quite match: the credit discrepancy banner
ClinyPal keeps a stored credit balance for each patient, and separately computes what that balance should be by working forward through their credit history — every credit added, every credit applied to an invoice. Under normal operation, these two numbers always agree, and you won't see anything unusual about credit on this tab at all.
Occasionally, though, the stored figure and the computed figure fall out of sync — this can happen around edge cases like a refund processed at an unusual point in the workflow, or a credit adjustment made while another change was in flight. When that happens, ClinyPal doesn't try to silently guess which number is right; it surfaces the discrepancy so a human can look at it.
Practically, what should staff do when they see this banner? Treat it the way you'd treat any other reconciliation flag: don't panic, and don't ignore it either. The right response is to walk through this patient's credit history line by line against what you know actually happened — refunds issued, credit manually applied, invoices paid with existing credit — and confirm which figure looks right. If you can't resolve it yourself, escalate to whoever handles billing administration at your clinic rather than editing the stored balance directly to make the banner disappear, since that risks locking in the wrong number instead of the right one.
Credit history
Below the billing settings card, the credit history section lists activity affecting this patient's credit balance over time — credit added, credit applied to an invoice, and any adjustments. It's the detail behind the summary balance, and it's exactly what you'd walk through if you ever needed to investigate the discrepancy banner above.
For actual invoices and payments, look elsewhere
To reiterate the distinction from the top of this article: the Billing tab covers settings and credit, not the patient's actual invoices or payments. Those live on their own tabs within the record, and the tools to create or record them live in the main billing area of ClinyPal.