Payments & deposits

What gets paid

Three kinds of payment flow through Angel: booking deposits (taken when an appointment is booked), visit charges (the consultation or procedure fee, attached to a visit), and standalone invoices. Each payment is pending until it's paid, and can end up failed, refunded, or canceled — the list always shows where every piastre stands.

At the desk

The front desk records payments directly: cash, Instapay, or card. Recording a payment marks it paid on the spot and can print a receipt PDF.

Anyone on the staff can open the payments list and print a receipt — "has she paid for this visit?" is a question a doctor asks too. Taking money, refunding it and cancelling a pending payment belong to the people who work the desk: owner, admin, receptionist, nurse and assistant. Voiding a payment is owner and admin only.

Online — through your own gateway

Patients can also pay online. The money settles into your clinic's own payment gateway account — Angel orchestrates the checkout but never holds your money. Connect your gateway credentials once in Clinic Settings (web only; Paymob in Egypt, Stripe in the Gulf), and online checkout lights up on your booking page and payment links.

Booking deposits

If no-shows cost you, take a deposit at booking. The policy lives in Clinic Settings: none, optional (the patient may pay to lock the slot), or required (the booking isn't confirmed until paid), plus the amount. It applies to your public booking page; the desk can always record a deposit manually.

The deposit counts towards the visit

A deposit is money already received, so Angel subtracts it from the visit charge rather than asking the desk to remember. Open the visit and the charge card says what was already paid and does the arithmetic — 500 − 200 = 300 still to collect — with the amount box prefilled with the balance, not the full fee. Save the charge and the deposit is marked as belonging to that visit, so a second visit the same day is never offered the same money twice.

Angel only counts a deposit whose appointment falls on the same day as the visit: a deposit forfeited by a no-show three weeks ago doesn't quietly pay for today, and one for tomorrow's appointment hasn't bought anything yet. Refunded amounts drop out of the credit. If the deposit covers the whole fee, the card says so and there is nothing to collect.

The ledger still shows both rows — the deposit and the balance — and they add up to the fee.

Refunds

A refund in Angel is a record, not a money movement: mark the payment refunded and note how the money went back (cash, Instapay, card, bank transfer). The actual transfer happens outside Angel — in your gateway dashboard or from the cash drawer. Refunding asks for confirmation.

You can give back part of a payment — leave the amount as it comes up to return the whole thing, or type a smaller figure. A partly refunded payment stays paid and carries a running total of what has gone back, so a second partial refund later picks up where the first left off. Only when the returns add up to the full amount does the payment become refunded. Angel refuses a refund larger than what's left, and tells you the remaining figure.

Voiding a payment recorded in error

A refund says money went back to the patient. Sometimes no money ever moved: the wrong amount was typed, or the payment was recorded against the wrong patient. That's a void, and it's a different act — it takes the payment out of the day's takings entirely rather than recording a return.

Voiding asks for a reason, which stays on the record, and is limited to the owner and admins — it rewrites what the clinic collected, so it isn't the desk's call. A payment that has already been refunded, even partly, can't be voided: the money movement is real and the refund is its record. Void what never happened; refund what did.

Reading the totals

Three figures sit above the list. Pending is money owed — payments recorded but not yet paid. Collected is everything the clinic has actually kept across the whole book, not just the page you're looking at, with refunds already subtracted. Collected today is the same figure for today only, by your clinic's own clock. Voided payments count in none of them. Filtering the list — by type, status or date — narrows what you see without changing the totals, which always describe the whole ledger.

When the subscription lapses

Under a lapsed subscription the clinic is read-only: payment history stays visible, but recording new payments is paused until the subscription is current again.