This article does not apply to Aiwyn Practice.
Aiwyn sits alongside your practice management system rather than replacing it, and a client payment travels from an emailed invoice to cash in your bank along a path worth understanding before you learn any single task.
Two portals, and why there are two
Aiwyn is not a single application. It is two front doors onto the same data: a Client Portal, which your clients use to look at invoices and pay them, and a Firm Portal, which your staff use to see what clients are doing and to act on their behalf. The split matters because the two audiences need very different things. A client needs one invoice, one button, and no login friction. A firm needs the whole book of business, permissions, collections tooling, and reporting.
Your practice management system stays the system of record
Aiwyn does not replace your practice management system and does not become a second place where billing truth lives. Client, invoice, and payment data is created and maintained in the practice management system, and it flows into the Aiwyn portals in a read-only capacity, displaying to users information based on what is available in the practice management system. The connection is near real-time.
The consequence worth sitting with is that Aiwyn shows you your data, accurately, including when your data is wrong. If a client's address or contact email is stale in the practice management system, it is stale in the portal, and the fix belongs upstream. This is the central trade-off of the read-only design: you give up the ability to correct things in Aiwyn, and in exchange you never have to reconcile two competing versions of a client record.
Payments run in the other direction. Money is collected in Aiwyn and then reconciled back into the practice management system, which is why reconciliation is a topic in its own right rather than an afterthought.
The path a payment takes
Many configurations and workflows are possible, so what follows is the common shape rather than the only shape.
It begins in your practice management system. The firm creates and posts an invoice there and sends the invoice email to a billing contact, exactly as it would without Aiwyn. Aiwyn then intercepts that outbound email and places a one-click email wrapper around it before sending it on to the original recipients. This is the pivotal move in the whole design: the firm's existing billing habits are left untouched, and the payment capability is added in transit rather than by asking staff to work somewhere new.
From the client's side, the wrapper adds a "pay invoice" button. Clicking it takes them to the Client Portal with the invoice already on screen. There is no hunt for an account number and, in the common configuration, no login wall between the email and the invoice.
The client then pays. They may pay part of an invoice, but they cannot overpay one. On payment, the Client Portal updates immediately, which ensures an invoice cannot be paid again in error, since duplicate payment on a stale portal view is the failure mode this design is guarding against.
Notification is simultaneous and two-sided. The firm is told a payment was made, and the client is emailed a receipt.
Money arrives later than the notification does
The most common source of confusion for new firms is the gap between "paid" and "deposited". Those are two different events, days apart.
Two business days after a payment is made, the payment is deposited to the firm's bank account connected to Aiwyn, and is included in the payment file emailed to the firm so the firm can reconcile the payment back into the practice management system. So a payment that shows as complete in the portal on Monday is not cash in the bank on Monday, and the reconciliation artefact — the payment file — arrives on the deposit cycle rather than the payment cycle.
Two business days is the headline figure and it is not the whole story. It varies by payment method, by the time of day the client paid, by bank holidays, and by country. It is also a gross figure: what actually lands in the account has already had merchant fees removed from it. Both of those are separate subjects with their own pages, and this one deliberately stops here rather than half-explaining them.
What this page deliberately leaves out
This is the orientation page, not the complete account. The mechanics of getting invoices out of your practice management system and through the wrapper, what each portal actually contains, how collections automation chases unpaid invoices, how reconciliation is performed, and how payment plans work are each treated in their own right. So are the two money questions raised above: when a payout lands, and why the deposited amount is smaller than the invoiced amount.
Related
- How Aiwyn invoice emails work
- How payouts work
- How transaction sweeping works
- Accepted payment methods
- Get started: Send your first invoice through Aiwyn