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Setting up a Payment Plan

Payment plans can be setup by the Customer Service Representative (CSR) to generate recurring payments. An example recurring payment would be for magazine or grocery subscriptions.

Payment plans are handled in the background by a scheduled Quartz job which should be configured by your IT team based on your business needs. Ideally, the payment plan job should run once per day.

Creating a Payment Plan

Go to Order Management > Payment Plans (recurring). You will open up the Payment Plans List. To create a new payment plan, click on New Payment Plan.
Select a customer contact to attach the payment plan to.
The Payment Plan New page appears. Complete the form as you would when creating a new order.
Under Payment Plan Details, you will set the cycles and parameters of the payment plan.
Once the payment plan is configured, click OK.

Field	Description
Plan Cycle (Cycle Mode)	You can choose from the following plan cycles, which determine how often the customer is charged. - No Cycle: No recurring payment is created. The customer is charged once when the initial purchase order is created. - Daily Cycle: recurring payment happens daily from start date. - Weekly Cycle: recurring payment happens weekly from start date. - Monthly Cycle: recurring payment happens monthly from start date. - Custom1/Custom2: these are placeholders for developers to create custom cycles within the Mediachase.Commerce.Orders.PaymentPlanCycle class.
Cycle Length	Entering a value of 1 or higher determines the unit of time for the Plan Cycle. For example, if the Plan Cycle is set to "Daily," and the Cycle Length is "3," then a transaction occurs every three days. If the Plan Cycle is set to "Monthly" and the Cycle Length is "1," then a transaction occurs once every month. If "2," every two months, etc.
Max Cycles	Determines the maximum number of cycles to run for this payment plan. For example, if the Max Cycles is set to "2," then the maximum number of transactions cycles is two and then the payment plan stops. Set the Max Cycles to "0" if you wish to run the payment plan indefinitely.
Completed Cycles	This tallies the number of completed cycles so far after the payment plan was created. When initially creating the payment plan, set this field to "0".
Start Date	Set the start date and time to determine when the payment plan should begin (beginning recurring transactions).
End Date	Set the end date and time when the payment plan should end (ending recurring transactions).
Is Plan Active	Set "True" to enable the payment plan. Set "False" to create the payment plan but keep it inactive.
Last Transaction Date	Logs the last transaction date. The date and time already in those two fields when first creating the payment plan should be kept as is.

Payment Plan Order Detail Page Explained

The payment plan begins once the first purchase order is generated. The purchase order can be created manually (by clicking on Create First Purchase Order) or automatically by the payment plans quartz job.

After creating a new payment plan, a new Order page appears. This is slightly altered from the original Order detail page that appears after creating a new order. The changes include:

Inability to manage shipments (i.e. release shipments for further processing)
An Orders tab that shows a history of processed purchase orders from this payment plan
A "Create First Purchase Order" button that a CSR can manually click on to create the first purchase order related to this payment plan. The button disappears after creating the first purchase order manually or when the payment plan quartz job runs and generates the first purchase order. Once that first purchase is generated, the payment plan goes into effect.
The purchase order number that is generated includes the parent ID of the payment plan. For example, if the payment plan parent ID is 35, the subsequent purchase orders are numbered as "PO35XXX."
When a payment is added to a payment plan, the customer is not charged. The customer is charged once the purchase order is generated for the first time (and through subsequent purchase orders). The payment plan simply collects the payment information until converted to a purchase order.

Editing and Canceling a Payment Plan

To edit an existing payment plan, go to Order Management > Payment Plans (Recurring) or Today/This Week/This Month/All. Click on the payment plan ID number to open the payment plans order details page and make edits.
To cancel a payment plan, when editing a payment plan, click on the Summary tab and then click on Cancel Payment Plan.