Payment Plans

Overview

Payment Plans allow you to break down your outstanding balances into manageable payments, giving end-customers a more affordable way to pay off their balance, reducing the churn rate for Aria clients. In this initial phase, we introduce capabilities to support collecting outstanding balances for struggling customers, in which case a payment plan is negotiated case-by-case depending on the customer’s balance and financial situation.

You set up a payment plan for an account by:

• Selecting specific invoices and transaction IDs to include.
• Choosing a billing group.
• Picking a payment plan type: aligned (where the due amount appears on the master plan instance statement) or independent (where the due amount uses a new email notification template class).
  • Defining the payment interval (frequency), period type (days, weeks, or months), and length.
  • For independent plans, setting the start date and due day. If you do not specify these values, the system calculates the schedule using bill lag days plus days until due from the payment method or terms.

    Note: The system makes a single collection call to the payment processor when a statement includes both a payment plan due and new invoice obligations.

• Previewing the plan via API before the customer agrees.

Payment Application Scenarios

Aria prioritizes payment plans over invoices for payment application. Customers must keep up with both payment plans and new invoices to avoid plans' going into Dunning.

• Underpayments—The payment plan due takes payment application priority, then the new invoice due amount.
• Overpayments—Aria applies payment first to the payment plan due amount, then the new invoice due amount. Aria applies any leftover funds to the next payment plan due amount. For example, if the customer pays $300 for a payment plan due amount of $100, and $100 for the new invoice due amount, Aria applies the extra $100 to the future payment plan amount due even if the payment plan due date is in the future.

View the flow of an aligned payment plan.

Payment Plan APIs

• create_payment_plan_m: Creates a new payment plan for an account, allowing the balance to be split into scheduled payments over time.
• get_payment_plan_list_m: Returns the list of payment plans on the account.
• get_payment_plan_details_m: Returns details of a specific payment plan at the time of API call.

Dunning

The system adjusts dunning once you create a payment plan: it assigns new due dates to the outstanding balance and only triggers dunning if the customer misses a scheduled payment. If services were already in dunning, the system removes them upon payment plan creation. 

Related Notifications and Events

These notifications and events support payment plans:

• The "Account Payment Plan Created" event under "Account and Master Plan Instances."
• The "Payment Plan Due Reminder" email template class to notify customers of upcoming dues.

  Note: Aria groups this email template class by account, billing group, and notification date. Therefore, Aria only sends one email reminder when an account's billing group has multiple payment plans with the same notify date.

• Strings and loops for statement templates to show upcoming payments due on anniversary statements.
• Support for bill lag days in payment terms and methods, which the system applies to payment plan notify dates and due dates.