Offline payments

Money that arrives outside Stripe: a cheque in the post, cash at the office, a bank transfer.

Say what you accept

On the collections policy, list the methods you accept. This is a three-state answer and the distinction matters:

Stored value	What members are told
Never set	Nothing. The Payments page says nothing about offline payment
An empty list	Online only. This is your community's actual answer
A list of methods	Those methods, with cheque payee and mailing address where relevant

An empty list is an answer. Not having answered is not. Set it before residents start asking.

While cheque or money order is accepted, also set who cheques are payable to and where to send them. A resident who posts a cheque to the wrong name has effectively not paid.

Recording a payment

Record it against a member and a fee, with the amount, the method, a reference (required for a cheque or money order, being the number on it), an optional note, and the date the money actually changed hands, which defaults to now.

Recorded payments are marked offline throughout, so a report can always distinguish money you watched arrive from money you were told about.

Reversing

A bounced cheque is reversed, not deleted. Reversal writes a signed-negative counter-entry and marks the original as reversed, so both entries remain and the arithmetic stays right.

The audit trail

Every recording and every reversal is written to an append-only trail with the actor, the member, the amount, the fee, the method, the reference and the before and after status.

The backend has no permission to update or delete rows in that table, so it is append-only in fact rather than by convention. That is what makes it worth anything at audit.