Payment plans start with a balance and include a schedule for transactions to run until the pre-specified balance is paid in full.

You have a few choices to make when deciding how to configure payment plans for customers:

• Which payment methods to support.
• Who is responsible for the payment schedule.
• Whether you want transactions to run automatically or if you want to manually control when to run the transactions.

Payment methods

You can allow customers to choose from several different payment method options for a payment plan.

• Card - for automated (with the saved card token) or manual (with the saved card token or full card information) payment schedule.
• Echeck - for manual payment schedule.
• Alternative payment method with "Pay later" feature (Klarna, PayPal, and Paypal (with Braintree)) - for automated payment schedule.

Schedule responsibility

You can also decide who is responsible for the schedule of payments.

• Nexio - available for card transactions.
• Merchant - available for card, echeck, and Paypal (with Braintree). The merchant creates an automatic or manual recurring transaction schedule.
• Bank - available for card transactions. The bank fully funds the merchant up front and handles billing the customer.
• Payment provider - available as "Pay later" feature with Klarna, PayPal, and Paypal (with Braintree). The payment provider fully funds the merchant up front and handles billing the customer.

Manual or automated schedule

For some gateways or connections and payment methods, it is possible to save a token or indicate that a transaction will be recurring and then manually run subsequent transactions. You could use this workflow to manually track a balance for a customer as payments are run. This allows the merchant to control when transactions run or to make a change such as lowering the payment amount for a time. The downside to this approach is that you must remember to run the transactions at the appropriate time and date. It is possible to create an application or website using the Nexio API to run these transactions, but each transaction must be sent individually.

Explore the following tutorials, based on how you want to implement the payment plan:

• Creating a Nexio-scheduled card payment plan
• Using pay later option for payment plan
• Running merchant-initiated transactions for a payment plan
• Setting up installments for a bank to handle the payment plan

See also

• Create a subscription endpoint for additional information about creating recurring transactions.
• Getting started with subscriptions for the subscription feature.