How do I record a payment that isn't tied to checkout — or correct one I entered by mistake?

BRM prompts for payment automatically at certain stage changes — confirming a booking, checking out an outstanding balance. An ad hoc payment is any transaction you record outside that flow, without changing the reservation's stage. Common reasons:

• a late return, charged after the fact
• extending a rental
• a breakage or damage charge

Recording one

Open the reservation and press Add Transaction on the Reservation Detail Panel. The dialog defaults the amount to whatever's outstanding — adjust it if you need something else, choose the payment method, and confirm. It's worth also adding a note to the reservation saying what the payment was for, and checking whether the reservation's price itself needs adjusting to match.

Using a negative amount

The amount field accepts negative values, which covers two different situations:

• A genuine refund — money you're actually giving back. Enter the amount as negative and say "refund" and the reason in the notes.
• Correcting a payment that was never real — for example an "online" payment logged against a booking that was never actually charged, or any other transaction entered wrong. There's no way to delete a transaction once it's recorded (payment records are kept permanently as the account of money that moved, even after a reservation itself is deleted), so the fix is the same mechanism: enter a matching negative amount to bring the balance back to what it should be, and note that it corrects a mis-recorded entry rather than a genuine refund.

Either way, the original entry stays on the record and the correction sits alongside it — the receipt nets out correctly, but the history of both the mistake and the fix is preserved.

See adding notes to your reservations for more on documenting what happened.