Why does a payment have to be all or nothing?

Something I've noticed about payment systems is that they tend to see money as very binary. Either somebody has paid you or they haven't.

Real life isn't always quite that neat.

Suppose somebody owes a small business £500. The business would obviously like the £500, but the customer only has £300 available today. In plenty of situations, receiving £300 now and the remaining £200 next week is perfectly reasonable.

The strange thing is that the conversation around arranging that often happens completely separately from the payment itself. Somebody sends a message, an agreement is made, one amount arrives and then everyone has to remember what's still outstanding.

We've been building partial payments into Spondula because I think the payment request should be able to reflect what people have actually agreed.

If I request an amount from you and you pay part of it, the request doesn't suddenly become meaningless. It can show what's been paid and what's still due.

That's useful between businesses and customers, but I think it's equally relevant for freelancers and ordinary people. Sometimes being able to pay something now is considerably better than being forced into a choice between paying everything and paying nothing.

It also makes me wonder how many things in payments still work the way they do simply because that's how the old systems were designed.

A payment doesn't always have to be one event.

Sometimes it's a conversation that gets settled over time.