Payment Schedules overview
The Payment Schedules feature enables you to collect a series of payments following customized timelines and rules. You have the flexibility to leverage a payment schedule to process either a single payment or multiple payments.
You can leverage this feature to split invoice or account balances into several installments, and then automatically process payments for the installments. Payment schedules can also be used to collect external payments made for the installments. Meanwhile, we’ve provided you the capability to easily manage and modify existing schedules, as well as to manually retry failed payments with updated configurations.
If a payment schedule is associated with a billing document, the payments generated by the payment schedule are applied to the billing document. If a payment schedule is not associated with any billing documents, unapplied payments are generated for the customer account. In addition, if you have the Standalone Payment feature enabled, Payment Schedules can also be used to create and process standalone payments.
You can only create standalone payment when your tenant has enabled the Standalone Payment feature. See support for creating and processing standalone payments for more information.
Key benefits
- Enables end customers to pay down their installments following customized schedules
- Provides full control over the exact date, time, amount, currency, payment gateway, and payment method to capture and process payments
- Allows for managing and updating existing payment schedules with great flexibility, thereby helping to reduce bad debts
- Ability to manually retry failed payments
- Supports for mapping external payments made against scheduled payment schedules
Important concepts
- Payment schedule: A payment schedule consists of one or more payment schedule items that can be picked up by payment runs, which are hourly scheduled by Zuora. Each payment schedule item will trigger a payment process. You can specify the triggering date and time, and other required information for the payments in the payment schedule. There are two types of payment schedules:
- Recurring payment schedule: Contains payments that will be triggered on a fixed date and time for each period, for example, on the first day of a month for six months in a row. You can specify the triggering date, hour, and occurrences for recurring payment schedules.
- Custom payment schedule: Contains one or more payments, each with a customized configuration, which means you can configure each payment schedule item independently.
- Payment schedule item: A payment schedule item contains information that is needed for triggering and processing a payment. It will be picked up and triggered by a payment run at the scheduled date and time.
See Getting started with Payment Schedules for how to start using this feature.