Payment Plans

Core Plan Ultimate Plan

Payment plans allow you to establish structured payment schedules for your customers, making it easy to track, collect, and manage installment payments over time. When using the Stripe integration, your clients can even make payments directly online either through their client portal or from a payment reminder email. With dashboard alerts, you are also kept aware of any overdue payments to follow up with the customer accordingly.

Contents

• Configuring Payment Plans
• Creating a Payment Plan
• Payment Plan Management
  • Viewing Payment Plans
  • Processing Scheduled Payments
  • Handling Overdue Payments

Configuring Payment Plans

To configure payment plan defaults, navigate to Payment Settings and locate the Payment Plans section. Here you can set:

• Default Deposit %: The standard initial payment percentage (0-100%)
• Default # Of Payments: Typical number of payments for your plans
• Default Payment Frequency: How often payments should occur (e.g., every 2 months)
• Send Email Reminder: Option to automatically notify customers about upcoming payments
• Reminder Days Before Due: How many days before the due date to send reminders
• Reminder Message: Custom message to include with payment reminders

Creating a Payment Plan

To create a payment plan:

1. Navigate to the customer's profile and scroll to the Payments section of the Overview tab
2. Click the New Payment Plan button
3. Select the order for which you want to create a payment plan
4. Configure the payment plan parameters:
   • Deposit Amount: Initial payment (can be a percentage or fixed amount)
   • Number of Payments: How many installments after the deposit
   • Payment Frequency: How often payments should occur
   • First Payment Date: When the first post-deposit payment is due
5. Click Preview Payment Plan to generate the payment schedule
6. Review and make any adjustments to individual payment dates or amounts
7. Click Save Payment Plan to finalize

The system will automatically:

• Prompt you to enter the deposit amount, either through Stripe or through your external payment processor
• Create scheduled payments with Pending status for future installments, with their due dates automatically set according to the schedule

Payment Plan Management

Viewing Payment Plans

Payment plans appear within the customer's payment history, where you can see:

• The deposit payment (marked as Paid)
• All scheduled future payments (marked as Pending)
• Payment due dates
• Payment status (Paid, Pending, or Overdue)

Processing Scheduled Payments

Payment plan payments are paid in one of two ways:

• Manually by a staff member. This follows the same sequence of steps as doing a regular payment, except it would be initiated through the pending payment. You can still either charge this through Stripe or through an external processor.
• Automatically by the customer: requires Stripe. If you have Stripe enabled for payment plans and have also enabled the automated payment reminder email, your customers will receive a payment link automatically prior to the due date. Additionally, if you have the client portal enabled, your customers can make pending payments through the client portal at any time.

Handling Overdue Payments

The system provides several visual indicators for overdue payments:

1. Dashboard Alert: The "Payments Overdue" widget shows all customers with late payments
2. Customer Profile Badge: A red "Payment Overdue" badge appears on customer profiles
3. Reports: You can run the payments report to find overdue payments based on a specified date range.