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Administration Guide for Oracle Billing Insight > Recurring Payments >
About the Recurring Payment Transaction Cycle
Oracle Billing Insight saves recurring payment information in the recurring_payments table. The pmtRecurringPayment job retrieves bills from Oracle Billing Insight, makes payments by either check or credit card, and sends email notifications for recurring payments. The pmtRecurringPayment job performs two functions:
- Contacts Oracle Billing Insight to get the latest bill for a recurring payment that a customer set up. This process is called synchronization. A recurring payment can only be synchronized with Oracle Billing Insight if it is associated with a bill and the amount to pay is the minimum amount due or the pay date is before the due date. A recurring payment with fixed amount and fixed date will not be synchronized with Oracle Billing Insight, which means there is no bill information associated with this recurring payment.
- Schedules payments, inserts a payment with the status of Scheduled in the check_payments or creditcard_payments table so that the payments are processed. This process is called scheduling. A payment is scheduled three days before the pay date by default. The number of days can be changed by changing the Number of days before pay date to schedule the payment field in the job configuration. This delay allows the customer to modify or cancel this payment before the payment is processed by the pmtCheckSubmit or pmtCreditCardSubmit jobs.
Table 68 shows the columns updated in the recurring_payments table by the pmtRecurringPayment job.
Table 68. Recurring Payment Transaction Cycles
Column Updated in the recurring_payments Table |
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bill_scheduled |
Y or N. This field determines whether the current bill associated with the recurring payment has been scheduled, or inserted into the check_payments or creditcard_payments columns. This parameter is always N for a fixed amount and fixed pay date. |
Status |
Active or Inactive. This status is calculated internally. The value indicates whether the recurring payment has ended, because either the pay date is after the end date, or the number of payments has reached the maximum allowed. |
last_process_time |
The last synchronization time. To improve performance, only bills whose doc date falls between the last processed time and the current job running time, inclusive, are synchronized. By default, the value in the last_process_time column is set to the start date of the effective period when the recurring payment is created, which means all bills whose doc dates are before the start date will not be synchronized. |
last_pay_date |
The pay date of last payment made. This value is set to 01/01/1970 if the recurring payment has not started yet. |
next_pay_date |
The pay date of next payment. It is calculated using the values in the start_date, last_pay_date and pay_interval columns. |
bill_id |
A foreign key reference to a row in the payment_bill_summaries table. Use the bill ID to retrieve the latest bill information paid by the recurring payment. It could be null if there is no such bill. |
curr_num_payments |
The current number of payments made. |
TIP: There is no payment inserted into check_payments or creditcard_payments table when a recurring payment is created by the user. Payments are inserted by the pmtRecurringPayment job.
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