The short answer
The Billing page
Billing access is a permission granted on request to the login that handles the money. With it, the Billing page in the portal shows the payment method on file, the invoice list with each one's status (open, paid, or overdue), a Make Payment button, a Copy Payment Link button while there is an open balance, a Copy Card Update Link button, and a Statement button. Open an invoice row and it shows every line item, the tax lines, and the payments applied to it. Everyone else reaches billing at billing@vocatech.com or 718.395.1550.
Paying an open invoice
On the Billing page, press Make Payment and pay with the method on file, a new card, or a bank account. A pay link does the same from an email: invoices carry one for customers on check terms and for automated customers whose charge failed, and billing can send one any time there is an open balance. The link is good for thirty days and works once. On the pay page you pick which open invoices to pay. A new method entered there becomes the new default only if you tick "save this payment method for future invoices"; left unticked it is used once and the old method stays.
Never email a card number
We do not take card numbers by email. Enter the card on the Billing page, or ask billing for the secure card-update link and enter it there.
Updating your card or bank account
Two roads. With billing access, replace the method on the Billing page: remove the old one and add the new one, since the Add button appears only when nothing is on file. Without billing access, ask billing for the card-update link. It shows your company name and the card on file, takes a new card, a new expiration date, or a bank account, needs no portal login, and charges nothing. An expiring card gets that link by email from us before it expires. Whatever you save there becomes the new default, and any open invoices are charged to it.
We hold one payment method at a time, card or bank account, and there is no backup method. Switching between the two is the same replace.
Statements
The Statement button sits above the invoice list, whether or not anything is owed. Pick the last 3, 6 or 12 months, this year, or everything; open it, download it, or email it with a copy to billing. It is a balance-forward statement: the amount due, an aging breakdown, every invoice, payment and credit in the period with a running balance, and, on each payment, the invoices it was applied to. It is the only account summary that exists, so a request for "a report of what we paid" is this.
Which card paid a past invoice is not on record; our billing keeps only the current method on file. For that detail, use your own card or bank statements.
Which invoice a payment went to
A payment is applied to the oldest open invoice, not to the month written on the check. A customer who runs a month behind will find the check numbers lined up with the wrong month, which looks like a lost payment and is not. The statement, and the Payments Applied line inside each invoice row, show which invoice each payment closed.
Sending a check
Mail it to the address on the invoice, or email a picture of it to billing and we apply it as an electronic check debit from the account printed on it, which clears in a few business days. Tell us which invoices it covers if it is not the whole balance.
Switching between automated and check terms
Ask billing. It is one change on our side that rewrites the account, the open invoices and the monthly template together. The choice offered on the pay page does not change your terms; it only records what you said. Automated needs a card or bank account on file. See billing cycle, reminders, and terms and portal logins for billing access.