Table of Contents
Join Dane Whitcomb as he walks through the installment billing setup and processing steps in this 4-part FastTrac series.
Installment Billing Part 1
Summary
In part 1, Dane starts the installment billing setup process with the creation of the Installment Billing Template.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:05
In this video, we're going to be going over installment billing, this is going to be a several part series. So this is going to be part one on creating an installment billing template. So to get things started, we're going to be going into our menu and into installment billing Template Management. So you can just search that and you'll find it here and Installment Billing Template Management. And really what this area does the billing Template Management is think of it as kind of your guidelines for how your billing is going to run. So what date are you going to bill people? How are you going to bill them. So if it's going to are they going to be able to pay with a credit card where it'll just auto deduct that each month? Or is it going to put a balance on their account, things like that. So these are kind of all your installment billing settings. So think of it kind of that way. So as you can see, I have two templates in here. But we're going to be going over creating a new one. So I'm going to Click Add.
Dane Whitcomb 0:59
And for this example, we're going to keep it kind of standard, we're going to be doing a 12 month, so like a yearly billing pass where on the first of each month, we'll get billed. And that's kind of a common scenario when it comes to like a fitness membership or something like that, that, you know, bills each month, and then it renews at the end of the year. So we'll call it 12 month billing. And this is just a code to give it and then you can also give it a description. So those can either be the same or something maybe a little longer in the description if you want to. Our interface mode and web usage option we're gonna leave as is auto and prompt our billing frequency and dates. So this is kind of when you can start to kind of catered to how you how you really want billing to run billing frequency. So this is like the actual times they're getting billed. So usually this is a monthly option.
Dane Whitcomb 2:01
If you are doing billing on a weekly or bi weekly basis, there are options for that. In this case, I'm going to do monthly on this day and say everybody, regardless of the date they purchase is just going to get billed on the first day of the month. That's pretty common. Another kind of common wanted to go with is monthly on Item begin day. And so if you let's say you buy your pass on the eighth, you'd always be getting billed on the eighth. So people can get billed on different days depending on when they're buying the pass. So that's kind of another common option as well. I'll do monthly on this day, and then I'll select it to be the first day of the month. But it's a maybe bill the 15th there's really any day you can pick. So there's flexibility when it comes to when you want to bill them.
Dane Whitcomb 2:47
The next option here is billing start date rules. So I'm going to be doing start with the next billing cycle and then skip one bill before the first cycle. And this is for when I make an initial purchase. So the reason I'm skipping one bill here is because I'm going to have a pay upfront fee for the first month that they'll pay when they first purchased the past. And that technically isn't an installment billing fee, that's just a standard fee. So I'm taking that into consideration that the first month or they're paying upfront. And in that case, instead of my bills being 12, it's going to be 11. Because again, that first month, I'm just paying as my standard fee up front. And then when I do a renewal, that's just going to roll into the next month. So this one's actually going to be 12 months, and I'm not going to be skipping any bills. So it's just going to roll right into the next month here. And the payment options is the last Field here. So this is how you want people to be able to set up their installment billing.
Dane Whitcomb 3:48
Do you want to auto debit ACH auto debit from a credit card that's, you know, a popular option if you allow people to insert their credit card and then have it auto deduct each month, or installment bill where it's going to create a balance when you run the installment billing on their bill date and just put that balance on their household, then they can either pay it over the phone through RecTrac or come into the office or they can pay it off on WebTrac as well. So usually, those are kind of the common options, the auto debit credit card and installment bill and then there is the auto debit ACH as well. And then you do have a default Pay option. So which one do you want to be the default. In my case, I'll choose installment bill. That way we can test it and not have to link at credit card. So I'm going to Click Save at this point that kind of wraps up creating my installment billing template. And in the next video, we're going to be going over creating and linking our fees to an actual pass.
Installment Billing Part 2
Summary
In part 2, Dane walks through how to create and link installment billing fees to an annual pass membership.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:00
In this video, we're going to be going over part two of our installment billing series, we're going to be going over creating and linking our installment billing fees to our annual pass. So to get things started, we're going to head into Pass Management in our RecTrac menu. And at this point, you'd want to at least have your pass records created, it's okay if you don't have the fees set up, because that's kind of what we're going over here in this video, but you do at least one have idea what passes are going to be having that installment billing, whether those are already created in your database, or you had to go in and Build those out. So in my case, I'm going to be using the annual billing membership. So I'm gonna Click Change. And just so you can get an idea of how this pass is set up in my database here. It's an annual pass, so my default periods 12, and my membership period option is month. That just means from whatever day I purchased it, so my transaction date, 12 months out is kind of the expiration date. So if I buy it today, on the 15th of February, it's going to also expire on the 15th of February, just one year out.
Dane Whitcomb 1:08
And then once you kind of have the pass setup to your liking, with the core and core continued screens with those pass settings, you can get into the fees here. So usually, when it comes to billing, you'd have a pay in full option and an installment Billing Option. That's not always the case. But it's kind of a common example here. So you'll see I have three fees here. One thing we can kind of first look at is there's one with a fee Type of installment billing it to our standard fees. So to keep it real simple, the bottom fee is our pay in full fee. So that's, you know, the monthly rate, multiplied by 12. So that's my annual fee of $600. So if they want, they can pay that all at once and just taking a quick look at it. It's real simple setup on this fee, it's just the standard fee. So once this loads here, I'll go over it real quickly.
Dane Whitcomb 2:05
It's just a fee description of paying for my pay in full amount, which is 600. Of course, you gotta have your revenue GL Code linked. And then my transaction Type, I want to include purchase and renewal. So if I do renew, I do still have that pay in full option for renewal as well as a purchase. And that's really all there is to it. So I can save that record. And then the two fee above it are actually both kind of intertwined with my billing option, even though only one says installment billing. This is my first first month fee. So that's why it's only on transaction Type of purchase and not renewal. If you remember, when I created my installment billing template, I had my initial purchase number of bills set to 11. And that's because I'm always going to be paying this first month fee up front. And then my renewal fees on this one. So when I renew this one, I'll be paying my 12 bills. So just taking a quick look at this first month fee, it's pretty similar or similar to the paying for option. It's a standard fee.
Dane Whitcomb 3:08
So the one thing that is different in this fee, it's a standard fee amount of $50. That's my monthly rate. And under the installment billing settings, I do need to link my installment billing template I created. Even though it's not an installment billing Type fee, it's part of it because it's my first month fee, so we need to know to link it back to that billing template. So I chose my 12 month billing. It's the one we created in part one of this series. So I'll save that record. And then the installment billing fee. So this is the actual fee that's going to bill them each month. So this fee is, it's really not too much different. There's a couple of things I want to point out on this fee, still gonna be $50 because that's my monthly rate. The other thing is the fee Type needs to be installment billing fee and that just allows it to be billed on a reoccurring basis. And then the other thing on installment billing settings is we also need to have that installment Billing Option linked so I also again, have that 12 month billing template here. And then this is also on purchase and renewals so you can renew through installment billing.
Dane Whitcomb 4:18
So kind of just quickly to summarize here I've two different options of paying and installment billing and a pay in full and that setup requires three fees two our billing on the top and one is pay in full. My first month fee is the only one that's not going to be set to renewal my other ones will be and that just is kind of a common scenario of how you might set this up. One thing to note is I don't have any criteria. You could say these are all residents so you could use a category criteria and say these rates are applied to residents. And then you could have another three fees setup below that are exactly the same except they might have a non resident criteria. And that's how you could do something where a resident First non-resident might get charged different billing rates so you can still use criteria it's just each one you do you'll have to add more fees to it so something to keep in mind but if you do need to charge different rates that options available.
Installment Billing Part 3
Summary
In part 3, Dane reviews the process of selling a pass with installment billing configured through Global Sales.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:05
In this video, we're going to be going over part three of our installment billing series, which is going to cover selling the installment billing pass. So I'm going to be going to global sales, that's where I'm going to sell my pass from. So in my menu going into global sales, and then I need to pick a household I want to sell it to. So you have your data grid here of available households, I'm going to pick kind of a random household here. Once I'm in the household, just like any other item you're selling in RecTrac, you need to kind of first determine the module itself. So I'm going to be choosing standard pass. And the pass that create it actually is right at the top since it is alphabetical here. So annual billing membership. And it's pulling in my default date of one year from my member begin and expiration date, which is good. And now I can Click add to cart.
Dane Whitcomb 0:59
So right at the beginning, you get this Field called Billing Option. And it's a drop down. So the first one that we see here is pay in full. And so that's the fee we created on the past that was $600. And that's the one if we choose it, it's just not going to be any sort of billing related to it, I'm just paying it all up front as a standard fee. So one flat fee payment, and that'll cover the year of my pass. So that's pretty easy option. But it's available for those who would like to pay in full. So in this case, we'll cover that option first. So it's going to be $600 in my cart when I Click continue here. And when I go through the payment Screen, it's just like any other transaction, there's nothing really too special about it. Since it's not billing, you can pay for with cash or card. However, whatever methods you accept, so I'm going to process the sale. And the next things we're going to go over is selling it as an actual installment billing method.
Dane Whitcomb 2:04
So I'm going to pick a different household, and I'm going to select the one below it. And again, I'm selecting my standard pass module and selecting that annual pass again. So I'm selling the same pass just two different ways one pay in full and one through installment billing. So if I now Click add to cart, I'm gonna get those same prompt options here. And I can either now choose installment billing, which would just when the billing date hits, it would put a balance on my household which I could pay it kind of through any means necessary online or in house again, or you can do credit card, and you can link a credit card and will actually auto debit the credit card each month. So if you're doing the credit card option, you can add slash change credit card information. And if there is link cards here, you can select that card or if you need to add a new card, you can Click the Add Credit Card Button.
Dane Whitcomb 3:00
And so in this case, I'm going to choose installment billing. So we don't have to enter any credit card information. And we can still see how the billing looks when we add it to cart. So here's my 12 month installment billing, I'm going to Click Continue. And I can see that there is a $50 payment in my cart. And if you remember when we set up the pass, we had one $50 fee, that was the standard fee, but we still linked it to the billing template. And so that's what this one is doing. It's saying $50 upfront, and then we'll pay monthly after this current month. So if I actually select the record, and it's kind of cool here, you can Click cart options and update bill from cart. And this is just going to give you a preview of what dates are going to get billed on. So as you can see, my first upfront payment was $50, which we saw on the previous Screen, but these are going to be actually all the billing records. So I'm gonna get billed monthly until two 120 24. And up top you can see the dates of your past. So my past is going to end on 215 2024. So I'm getting billed right up until that last month and then I can choose to renew at that point. One thing to note in here, you can add a new billing record. So you could add another month, you could delete a billing record or you could just recreate it entirely. So there is a few last minute tweaks you can do if you need to when selling a pass. So at this point, I could Click payment, just like I did with my pay in full one. I'm going to be going through my payment Screen the same way. So for this $50 upfront fee, how do I want to pay cash or card so you still have that option. And so that kind of just goes over how to sell an installment billing pass both the pay in full method and through an installment Billing Option method
Installment Billing Part 4
Summary
In part 4, Dane demonstrates how to run the Installment Billing program and auto-debit patrons' credit cards or leave a balance on their household.
Video
Transcript
Dane Whitcomb 0:05
In this video, we're going to be going over part four of our installment billing series, which is going to be actually running the installment billing process. So you can either auto debit patrons credit cards through billing, or you can place that in somebody's billing balance on their household. So the first thing I like to do when running, this is actually opening up household management, as well. So household management will have up. And if we find one person in here who has billing. So I know in my last video, I sold installment billing to this household here. So I'm going to Click on the installment billing update. And this is actually kind of handy with any person who has an installment billing record. So any family member or household in that list there, you can Click that installment billing update and you can see there installment billing fees and actually, you can change billing in here as well. So you can change the bill amount for future bills, you can delete a billing record out of here.
Dane Whitcomb 1:03
So a handy tool. But once we want to run the actual billing, we're going to be going into installment billing in our menu. And in a second, you'll kind of see why I brought up this Screen why it's helpful for this scenario. So one thing to kind of go over, you might be running billing monthly. And in my scenario, I will be because when I created my installment billing template, I set that all bills will be monthly on the first day of the month. But if you remember, there was an option to do monthly on like the item begin date, where the bill date would normally be the begin date of the pass on each month. And that begin date of the past can be different based on whenever people are buying in the past. So you could be billing almost every day. But more likely, if you're doing that, you'd be scheduling this. So this process can actually be scheduled to run every day. And that way would pick up whoever has a bill due on that current day.
Dane Whitcomb 2:03
If you're doing it monthly, you can still schedule it to run on the first of the month. Or you can come in here and just run it on the first of the month. It's kind of preference on that a lot of people do like to schedule it out once they see how it works for a few months or that first month. So my processing option, I will have it on journal only to start this is think of it as a preview, it'll show me who's going to be billed, but it won't actually do the billing. So this is great. If you're running it for your first time, or really anytime you're running it just to make sure things look good before you actually process. My billing date, usually this would be today because it's going to be either scheduled to run on the date the bills do, or you're going to be coming in here on the date those bills are due and running it but in my case, no bills are due today. And if we look at the household, I can actually determine what their first bill date will be. So I can see its 4/1/2023. So that's what I'll use to fill in my billing date with so I'm going to use actual date.
Dane Whitcomb 3:05
And then I'm gonna do April 1 of 2023, my posting date again that you would usually match the billing date. So in most cases it would be today, but I'm going to match it to the date billed for. So that's gonna be 4/1/2023. And then my include Bill types. So on my installment billing template, you can remember that I toggled on different options that I would take when I accept an installment billing membership. So if they want to do an auto debit to a credit card, or through an installment bill, so I chose both those options I know I only have sold through installment billing but still doesn't hurt to select both options you have on your template to make sure you're including everyone. modules to include, I'm just going to be doing pass memberships. But if you're using billing for a different module, maybe activities or something like that, you can choose all the modules that would apply.
Dane Whitcomb 4:02
You have to pay reference fields to put in a payment reference. You can choose which user is running installment billing. The report output option so of that report, preview I get do I want it as a CSV or PDF. You can also choose to email receipts to your patrons when installment billing runs. So if you want to do that, you can turn that email receipts Toggle on household Options tab down here. You probably won't use this too often. Think of this as probably only using it if you want to bill specific households. So instead of just running kind of billing wide open for certain passes. You only run a run it for a certain household or maybe a group of households. You could select those and under my installment bill settings you have the option to put in a due date. So in most cases, that's going to be the today value maybe plus so you could do a dynamic date.
Dane Whitcomb 5:01
So today and then put seven. So whatever my bill date is, it's going to be seven days out from that is wanted to do. In my case, I'll just put an actual date out from my billing date since it's not until April. So my bill date was April 1, I'll choose April 8 As it's due. Receipt options, So if you want any custom text to show on any of these installment billing receipts, you can put them either in the daily comment code as a saved code you already have created. Or you can do freeform as the daily comment text here. And then the rest of these Tabs are based on the module you're billing for. So as you can see up here, like I mentioned, I'm only including pass memberships. So I'm really only concerned about the pass membership settings, none of these other Tabs are going to apply for this billing run. So under the pass code range, these are the bills or the passes I want to bill for. So I know I've sold installment billing towards that annual billing membership. So I'm going to select that as my begin and end pass to ensure I'm only including those members in my installment billing run.
Dane Whitcomb 6:13
And then these other kind of toggles here are more personal preference. So if for any reason you have bills that are on an expired pass, so somebody's past as a status have expired, but they still have some bills that are due for this date, do you want to bill them or not? So if you Toggle it on it will bill them if you don't, it'll not bill them. Suspended passes with credit card declined. So as a result of this process, anybody who had auto debit, so a credit card linked to their installment billing, if it did decline, do you want to suspend their pass, so you turn it on, it would suspend their past in that case passcode status, you're usually running this against active passes, but there is the option to have inactive as well.
Dane Whitcomb 6:57
So at this point, I've kind of got all my installment billing settings in here, how I like it, and I Click process. So there's the option to schedule it. But in this case, I'm just going to run it. And this, depending on how many records were billing against, kind of determines how long this usually takes. I know I only have one if not, maybe just a few records. So yeah, I have two records here. So it didn't take too long to generate. But I can see these were both installment billing memberships, and it put a $50 balance on their household because that's what it billed them for. If you were billing against credit cards, it would also give you a list of anybody who's payment for one reason and another was declined. So their card was declined. For one reason maybe the card wasn't had a expiration date they went by or something like that. It'll give you a list of those