Managing an Installment Plan

Availability: all plans

Once a plan exists you follow it from its detail page. This guide covers recording the customer's acceptance, recording payments, setting the reminder schedule, and suspending, resuming or cancelling a plan. It also explains what happens when an automatic payment fails.

Before you start

Open Money, then Installment Plans, and select View Details on a plan. Viewing needs permission to view installment plans.
Recording acceptance needs permission to create installment plans.
Record Payment, reminders, Suspend, Resume and Cancel need permission to manage billing automation. Without it the page is read-only.

Steps

Record an acceptance. While the plan shows Waiting for the customer to accept:

Read the agreement wording shown on the page.
Under How did the customer agree?, choose In person, on site, By telephone, By email reply or Signed paper authorization. Customer acceptance through their own account is not offered here, because only the customer can do that.
Select Record acceptance. The payment schedule is created.

To retract a proposal the customer never accepted, select Withdraw proposal. Nothing is owed under it, no notice is sent, and the invoice becomes free for another plan.

Record a payment.

In Payment Schedule, select Record Payment on a Pending, Overdue or Failed installment.
Enter Amount Received. It opens on what the installment still owes.
Choose a Payment Method: Cash, Check, Card (External), ACH (External), Wire Transfer or Other.
Set the Payment Date, which cannot be in the future.
Enter the reference. It is required for every method except Cash, and its label follows the method, for example Check Number. Notes (Optional) is free text.
Select Record Payment.

A smaller amount leaves the installment open for the rest. A larger amount applies forward to the next installments. Anything beyond what the plan owes is held as credit for the customer, and the dialog warns you before you save.

Set reminders. Under Customer email reminders, enter Reminder offsets as days from each due date. Negative numbers send before the due date and positive numbers after. New plans start with -3, 1 and 7. Give a Reason for change and select Save reminders. Leave the offsets blank to remove all reminders. You can enter up to 20 unique values from -365 to 365.

Suspend, resume or cancel. Suspend Plan appears on an Active plan and Resume Plan on a Suspended one. Cancel Plan appears on either. Cancelling ends the payment terms but does not write anything off: the remaining balance stays owed on the invoice, due on the invoice's own terms. The confirmation shows the amount.

When automatic payments fail

A failed charge is recorded against the installment and the plan, and the installment shows its error. The plans list shows failures next to Auto-Charge and a count of plans with payment failures. When failures reach the plan's tolerance, the plan is suspended. Resuming it resets the failure count. The detail page also shows whether the payment processor connection is ready.

Tips

Statuses on the schedule are Paid, Pending, Failed and Overdue.
The plan summary shows Total Paid, Remaining Balance and the installments completed.

If something goes wrong

If a button is missing, check the plan's status and your permissions.
If recording fails with a message about the reference or date, fix that field and try again.
If reminders fail to save, the message names the problem, for example a non-numeric offset.

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