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.

For collection and dunning purposes, a payment plan provides new dates and due dates for a payment plan schedule created to pay past due invoices or charges while leaving financial reporting and revenue recognition untouched: the invoices or charges will retain their original billing dates or due dates.
If a subscription or a master plan instance is in dunning, creating a payment plan will automatically take it out of dunning. 

Customers with ongoing subscriptions must stay current on both their payment plan due and any new invoice obligations. Falling behind on either can place the account back to a dunning status.

You can set up a payment plan to pay off any account balance, whether past due or not yet due, supporting both self- and parent-pay accounts. Each payment plan has a 1:1 relationship with a Billing Group: it can only cover balances associated with subscriptions (master plan instances) under that Billing Group. 

An example of how dunning behaves when an account has a payment plan but not keeping up with their new charges:

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: payment plan schedule follows the aligned master plan instance statement associated with the payment plan. Aria includes the due amount on the master plan instance anniversary statement.
  • Independent: schedule is defined independently, and Aria notifies customers of the due amount via the payment plan due reminder template class. 
• Defining the payment interval (frequency), period type (days, weeks, or months), and length.
• You can also assign different payment methods to pay for payment plans (other than those associated with the billing group). 
• To support existing payment plans created on other systems, you can specify the custom sequence to start (for example, normally payment sequence starts with 1, with custom sequence; the payment plan sequence can start with sequence #5). 
• 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.
• Previewing the plan via API before the customer agrees.

Learn more about how Aria applies payments to outstanding charges for accounts with payment plans.

Payment Management

Payment collection and payment application methods (First-In-First-Out, First-Due-First-Out, Manual, and Statement First-In-First-Out) support payment plans due.

Similar to how Aria allocates payments to regular charges/invoices: when Aria receives a payment, it prioritizes applying the payment based on the payment application method specified in the client configuration (Configuration > Payments > Payment Settings > Default Payment Collection method) or specified by your customers via your user self-service portal.

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. 

You can more precisely specify dunning behavior for payment plans via the dunning setting "Dunning Option for Payment Plan."

Communications and Event Notifications

New communications for both end customers and 3rd party systems have been introduced to support different lifecycles of payment plans, from payment plan creation, reminder due amount to the completion of payment plans.