Batch payments with payment orders
If you're paying multiple vendors at once — say it's the end of the month and you need to pay Lipsey's, RSR, your landlord, and your alarm company — CloudFFL OS has a payment order feature that lets you batch everything together instead of registering payments one at a time.
What is a payment order?
A payment order is a batch of vendor payments grouped into one document. Think of it as your weekly or monthly "bills to pay" run. You select which bills to include, review the total, and process them all at once.
Creating a payment order
- Go to Accounting → Vendors → Payment Orders (if you don't see this menu, check under Accounting → Payments → Payment Orders).
- Click New.
- Select the Payment Mode — this defines how payments are made (e.g., bank transfer, check). If you haven't set up payment modes yet, see the tip below.
- Click Create Payment Lines from Journal Items. This lets you pull in outstanding vendor bills automatically.
- A filter dialog appears. You can filter by:
- Due date — only bills due before a certain date
- Vendor — specific vendors
- Amount — minimum or maximum amounts
- Click Add to pull matching bills into the payment order.
- Review the payment lines. Remove any you don't want to pay this round.
- Click Confirm to finalize the payment order.
- Click Generated to mark the payments as processed.
Setting up payment modes. Payment modes define how you pay — bank transfer, check, ACH, etc. Go to Accounting → Configuration → Payment Modes and create one for your primary payment method. Most dealers need one or two: "Bank Transfer" for wire/ACH payments and "Check" for paper checks. Once set up, they appear in the dropdown when creating payment orders.
When to use payment orders vs individual payments
| Situation | Best approach |
|---|---|
| Paying one bill right now | Register Payment directly on the bill |
| Paying 2-3 bills from the same vendor | Multi-select bills → Register Payment |
| Monthly bill run (5+ vendors) | Payment order — batch everything together |
For most single-location FFL dealers, individual payments or multi-select work fine. Payment orders become more valuable as your vendor count grows or if someone else handles the bookkeeping and needs an approval step before payments go out.