FAQ Q273: Is it possible to give my customers a possibility to make multiple partial payments (instalments) for their reservation?

Yes, you can set this up in Planyo. To make things simple let’s consider a typical scenario where a deposit of (for example) 25% is required at the time of reservation and then the remaining amount must be paid no later than 1 week before arrival.

First of all, in Resource settings / Reservation process you should change the confirmation method to obligatory payment and pre-payment amount to 25%. You could also use optional payment but with this setup we can be sure that the customer makes the initial payment in order to reserve the requested time period.

At this point the first payment is taken care of (assuming that you defined your pricing in Pricing manager and that you entered your payment gateway account information.

For the second part of the payment, we must set up an email notification in Site settings / Notifications. Click on the Add message to be sent after or ahead of time button in order to create a new notification and then set the event options this way:
Relative to: Rental start time
Time difference: 10 days before
Required status: Reservation confirmed
Now click on the Edit link next to the Email checkbox (which should be checked) in the Client column.
This event will send an email to the customer 10 days before arrival. You’ll need to inform the customer that they have 3 days to make the final payment. In Q204 you’ll find tags which you’ll need to use to get the payment link and the required payment amount. For example, your email body could include a sentence like this:

You have 3 days, that is, until $(date_diff-7:$(start_date)) to make the final payment for your rental. The required amount is $(amount_outstanding).

<a href="$(payment_form_url_outstanding)">Click here to make this payment</a>

You can verify the payment has been sent manually (and contact the customer otherwise). In this case you’d need to set up another notification, sent to you (the main administrator) 7 days before the arrival. The body of this notification should be wrapped inside the tag:
$(if) $(amount_outstanding) greater than 0 $(then)
... Email body goes here, e.g. Customer $(first_name) $(last_name), reservation $(reservation_id) still has an outstanding balance of $(amount_outstanding) 7 days before arrival ...
$(endif)

This way the email would be ONLY sent if the customer still has an outstanding payment to make. It’s because of the feature of planyo where email messages with empty body are never sent out. The $(if) condition above would not write anything (so the body would be empty) in case the condition is not met.

If you don’t want to verify the payments manually, you can go back to Resource settings / reservation process and set Automatically cancel reservations when less than 100% was paid within specified time and set this time to 7 days before rental. You can also set up a separate notification for the automatic cancellation event.

Now, the last thing we could set up is the scenario where the customer makes a last minute reservation (reserves LESS than 10 days before arrival). By default they would NOT receive the notification message and they wouldn’t know about the need to make the second payment (unless your standard email would mention this). To solve the problem, you can add a pricing manager rule for this scenario (Time remaining until rental: from 0 to 10 days), and then instead of setting a different price for this rule, change the unit to PRE-PAYMENT AMOUNT and the “price” to 100%. This way the customer will need to pay 100% of the amount.

Another solution is to increase the default value of the option Window of time for the notifications sent X days before arrival which you'll find in Site settings / Active features which allows you to set up planyo to send emails scheduled to be sent earlier at a later time in case the reservation was added (or confirmed) closer to arrival than X days.
Domande frequenti