Why it Matters

GrowthZone customers and their members want insight and simpler control of the autopay process. The new feature creates a user experience aligned with what our members are used to seeing on their credit card or utility autopayment - the details of the upcoming payment before it happens.

What we did

At it’s core, the Invoice Before Autopayment is about separating the processes that generate invoices from the process that charges payment profiles for those invoices.

There is a now a setting in Finance > General Settings called “Invoice before Autopayment”

Settings and Expectations

Part of this is work is about risk management. We want all customers to start using this feature. Currently there are four possible configuration to understand.

Use Automated Billing - Off ❌ ; Invoice before Autopayment - Off ❌

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• When will scheduled billing items generate invoices?

  • Invoices without payment associated payment profiles be generated based on the “Lead Time Days” setting. The invoices will show up generate that many days prior to the Next Bill Date of the scheduled billing item which becomes the Invoice Date for the newly created invoices.

• When will scheduled billing items with a payment profile be paid?

  • Any invoices that have a payment profile associated will be created and the payment profile charged the day of Next Bill Date of the scheduled billing item which becomes the Invoice Date.

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This setup also leaves invoice generation and autopayment linked and does not allow for invoices to be sent ahead of the payment date.

Decoupling these setting mitigates risk associated with autopayment processing.

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This setup allows all invoices to be generated according to your lead days and have autopay accounts . Customer can send invoices with advanced notice of the scheduled payment and members can review their upcoming payment in the info hub.

Use Automated Billing - Off ❌ ; Invoice before Autopayment - On

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Staff are able to control the scheduled payment date from the invoice. They can move it forward or back. Members can cancel an autopayment from the InfoHub Info Hub but can’t change the actual date.

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Just like before, the customer will get a notice of this. The card will not be run again so how to handle those cases will be up to the business. There are several reports that can be reviewed to monitor if that is an issue.

How is the Scheduled Payment Date determined for the invoices? Can I change the date to charge the profiles?

The Scheduled Payment will be the same as the Next Bill Date. An individual invoice can have the date Scheduled Payment dated edited by a staff member but there is not currently a way to make that change for all the invoices.

Why does the “Lead Time Days” setting have to be greater than 0?

This is a bit of an technical order of operations thing. From a user perspective it doesn’t make sense to have lead days be 0 and the new feature turn on since that setup is negating the usefulness of the Invoice Before Autopayment features.