Terminology: Charges, Payments, and Payouts
Novi Pay uses the following terminology to align closely with the underlying financial operations:
Term | Meaning |
Charge | Refers to a transaction initiated via Novi Pay. This could be tied to an invoice payment or a sales receipt. >> Learn More about Charges |
Payout | Money sent from Fiserv to your bank account. We do not refer to this as a "payment" to avoid confusion. |
Top-up | Specific to our legacy processor Novi Pay, powered by Stripe - A transfer of funds from your bank account to Stripe, used when you issue a refund without having enough available balance in your pending payouts or to cover incidental fees. |
If you are using Novi Pay's legacy processor, powered by Stripe, please view this Novi Pay: Sunsetting Features article for details about payouts, refunds, and top-ups.
How Payouts Work
Most of the time, you'll be collecting money through credit card and ACH charges, and the payment processor will send that money to your bank account on a regular cadence. Novi Pay creates payments or sales receipts in QuickBooks Online and groups them into deposits based on the payout schedule from the payment processor.
Novi Pay matches each payout sent to your bank with a "deposit" in QuickBooks:
1 payout = 1 QuickBooks deposit
Novi Pay creates associated payments or sales receipts and links them to the deposit
When a payout is processed to your bank, Novi Pay automatically records deposits in QuickBooks that reflect the batch of charges making up each payout. Read more about the life cycle of a payment.
By creating deposits in this way, Novi Pay is ensuring that the payout amount in Novi Pay matches the actual deposit into your bank, for clean and accurate bookkeeping.
In Novi, these payouts will be reflected under Novi Pay > Balances.
Refund Process
Refunds with Novi Pay - Fiserv can be issued in several locations depending on what you are refunding. For example, if you are refunding an event or ecommerce order, it would be best to process those refunds from the designated areas in Novi. For more one-off exceptions like a partial refund or a membership refund, you can process that directly from the Novi Pay Charges tab.
Partial refunds aren’t available while a payment is still processing. While processing, only a full refund option is available. After a charge has settled, a partial refund will be available, if needed. After a refund is submitted, the funds are returned to the original payment method and may take several business days to appear, depending on the customer’s bank or card issuer.