Questions for Accounts re Payment by Installments

Development
1

Let’s suppose you’re running a course, and it’s £100 for the term, and you’re letting people pay a 20% deposit with the balance due before the start of term.

Someone comes and books a place on the course and hands over £20 cash.

What do you expect to see on your payment reconciliation summary at the end of the day?

  • An order for £100 and a payment of £20 cash (so the orders and payments don’t add up to the same amount)
  • An order for £20 and a payment of £20 cash (so that the order value is reduced to the deposit amount)
  • An order for £100 and a payment of £20 cash and £80 by account / invoice (so that the order is recognised in full and the fact that the later payment is pending is by payment type)

0 voters

2

@Cockpit_Akilah @denise.cresswell @kathryn @KathrynLS @wendy.tulloch

Could you ask your account departments what they expect to see?

I sort of can’t do the middle option (2) and would mildly prefer (3) over (1) from the point of view of how the system fits together.

3

the last one is the one they prefer

4

Hurrah! It’s nice when the version I think is most sensible is the one that people want!

5

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6

OK next question:

My plan is to use the installments as prompts for reminders, but not as individual bills that can be paid separately.

For example:

Suppose an order is due to be paid in 4 installments.

Installment 1 (Deposit): £20 - Due 1st October
Installment 2: £20 - Due 8th October
Installment 3: £30 - Due 15th October
Installment 4: £30 - Due 22nd October.

I don’t think it makes any sense for someone to be able to pay installment 3 before installment 2 is paid.

If installment 2 was missed then on the 15th October they’re going to get a prompt to pay £50. If they pay £30 (the amount of installment 3 due that day) we are not going to mark installment 3 as paid with installment 2 as unpaid. It’s going to look like installment 2 is paid in full (late) and installment 3 is part paid (by £10).

That is: payments are made against the order, not against the installments.

I can imagine that someone might want to pay early, but I don’t want to put individual payment links against the installments. Instead I think I want buttons for:

  1. Pay amount owning (which will be £0 in this example on the 7th October, £20 on the 9th October until we make a payment)
  2. Pay amount owing if any and next installment early (which would be £20 on the 7th October, and if we didn’t pay installment 2 it would be £50 on the 9th October.
  3. Pay off full balance.

I can’t imagine anyone needing any other option… what have I missed?

7

Someone might have £40 with installment 2 due. why not just let them pay £20 for installment 2 and £20 towards installment 3. i.e. have pay what due button, pay custom amount input and pay full balance.

8

Don’t much fancy letting them pay a random amount: adding a text box for typing numbers in increases a thousandfold how fiddly it is to use on mobile and how much testing we need to do.

I figured they would either want to get up to date, or they might be in a day early to pay the next installment, but they were unlikely to part-pay a future installement.

9

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