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How to Set Up Payment Plans

Payment plans are now available for membership applications and dues renewals. Portal users can use either a credit card or ACH profile to enroll in a payment plan. Payment plan options are connected to dues options, so payment plans are only available for membership applications if that membership application fee has a dues option set and that dues option has related payment plan options. Organizations have the ability to configure if a dues product should be split between all of the payment plan payments or if it should be included in the first payment. We imagine the first option will be used for traditional dues products, and the latter will be used for optional products (ex: PAC contributions). However, membership application fee products will always be included in the first payment. 

1.In the CRM, navigate to the wanted Member Type record that will have Payment Plan options

5.Click on “Add Existing” to add existing Payment Plan Options or create new Payment Plan Options

6.Fill out the necessary fields on the Payment Plan Option record

  • Name - The name of the Payment Plan option
  • Number of Payments - This is the number of payments included in the payment plan. For example, if you wanted to set up a quarterly payment over a year, you would set this number to 4
  • Payment Plan Interval - This is the entity where the Interval Length and Units are set for the associated Payment Plan option
    • Name - The name of the Interval. Examples include Quarterly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily, or any Custom interval
    • Interval Length - How often the System will charge per Interval Units
    • Interval Units - Months or Days (dropdown field)
      • Examples:
      • If you wanted a Monthly charge, you would set the Interval Length = 1 and Interval Units = Months. (Charged every 1 month)
      • If you wanted a Weekly charge, you would set the Interval Length = 7 and Interval Units = Days. (Charged every 7 days)
      • If you wanted a Quarterly charge, you would set the Interval Length = 3 and Interval Units = Months. (Charged every 3 months)

7.Once the Payment Plan Options are set up, users will have different options during the Membership Application Process on the portal:

NOTE: There is a pre-existing bug that makes it so you need to have a one-time product set on the membership application fee for the application fee to show up on the Portal and Membership wizards.

Payment Plan Expiration Logic

Payment plans will not start until a Membership cycle starts and will not extend past the expiration date of the Membership cycle. For example, if a Membership Cycle is dated from 1/1/2022 - 1/1/2023, the Payment Plan Start date will be the current date and the Payment plan End date will be the same as the Membership Expiration Date.

Please review the additional Payment Plans setup:

Payment Plan Failed Message Service Configuration Property setup:

  1. Go to the settings record and click into the Default Payment Processor service configuration
  2. Verify or Create the following Service Configuration Property record:
    1. Name: PaymentPlanFailedMessage
    2. Type: String
    3. Value: We encountered an error creating the payment plan. Please contact the organization.
    4. Purpose: This is the message a portal user will see if their payment plan was not created correctly in Authorize.NET. Please note the default value in code is the actual error code.  

Queried Cron Job setup:

  1. Name: Evaluate Membership Application Requirements (Please note this may already be set up. If it is, you will most likely just need to update the query to match below)
  2. Type:Queried
  3. Instances are Unique: No
  4. Workflow for Query: Evaluate Membership Application Requirements
  5. Please note if this isn’t set up, you should set it up and add it to the client solution. Here is the set up:
  1. Expression: 0,15,30,45 * * * *
  2. Entity Target: cobalt_membershipapplication
  3. Message Name: QueriedCronJob

Query setup:

Authorize.net configurations:

If the client plans on using payment plans, please ask them to enable automatic retry in authorize.NET. Please use these instructions.

Please note that Authorize.NET has a default setting that limits five (5) transactions from an IP address per hour; when the limit is reached, any additional transactions will be flagged and must be approved manually within 5 business days or they will declined. In order to prevent widespread declined payments, this transaction limit should be increased.