Payment Operations
This article explains how to collect and process payments for single customer accounts and for multiple customer accounts.
About Payment Operations
The Zuora Payment Operations module in Zuora allows you to automate your recurring payments, manage overpayments (using the credit balance feature), and create refunds. Zuora Payments has many features to help you streamline your process for handling failed payments, including notifying customers when their credit card payments fail, and reconciling payments (tracking them back to their original invoice). In addition to payment processing, the Payment Operations module also helps you to manage the entire recurring payment lifecycle in one complete and secure solution.
Key Concepts
Here are the key concepts to understand when working in payment operations in Zuora:
- Payment Run: Payment runs are used to collect payments for a batch of customers. You can create an ad hoc (on demand) payment run that executes once, or you can create a scheduled payment run to execute on a recurring basis (daily, monthly, etc.). The only customer accounts processed in a payment run are those that have an invoice due and the Auto-Pay option enabled.
- Auto Pay: In the Customer Accounts module, you can enable customers for Auto-Pay which means that the customer has authorized you (as the merchant) to automatically charge their electronic payment method on file when payment is due.
- Create a Payment: Payments can be created for a single customer account at any time with or without Auto-Pay enabled for the customer. You can create a payment for the full or partial invoice amount.
- Credit Balance: The credit balance feature allows you to accept overpayments and apply an overpayment (treated as a credit) towards a future invoice just as you would apply a payment. The credit balance feature is available upon request. To enable this feature, contact Zuora Global Support.
- Refunds: Zuora supports electronic refunds and external refunds, for example, tracking a refund on a payment made by cash or check.
- Payment Notifications: The built-in customer notifications feature in Zuora lets you:
- Notify customers when their credit cards have expired, are about to expire, or have failed in a payment attempt
- Request updated credit card information from the customer.
- Payment Retry Rules: A payment run will re-attempt payment collection on an electronic payment method if the initial payment attempt fails. You can control the number of times a credit card is retried for payment and when the retry attempt occurs.
Additional Resources and Activities
To learn more about payment methods:
- See the documentation on Payments, which includes information on payment runs and refunds.
- Access your company's test account on the Zuora API Sandbox and try the following:
- Create a payment run.
- Create a payment for one customer account.
- Refund the payment you just created.