Implementation Guide for Oracle Billing Insight > Payment Processing >

About Recurring Payment Processing

Oracle Billing Insight provides two types of recurring payments for check and credit or debit card:

• A recurring payment. A recurring payment allows a customer to schedule a payment amount that is fixed or for the entire amount due from a bill. The payment can be scheduled to be paid on a certain date of the month.
• An automatic payment. An automatic payment allows a customer to schedule a payment of a fixed amount or for the entire amount due from a bill, to be made a certain number of days before due date. Automatic payments of the entire amount due can also be made, if the amount due is less than a specified amount.

Both recurring and automatic payments are designated as recurring payments by the NACHA 2009 specification. NACHA 2009 defines a payment as recurring when the account manager (Oracle Billing Insight) keeps the account information in a database.

Recurring payments can be modified or cancelled at any time before the payment is scheduled.

Recurring payment allows a customer to make payments automatically, based on the amount and pay date. There are five kinds of recurring payments:

• Amount due and before due date, for example, pay the entire amount due two days before the due date.
• Amount due and fixed pay date, for example, pay minimal amount due on day 31 of each month.
• Fixed amount and before the due date, for example, pay $100 one day before the due date.
• Fixed amount and fixed pay date, for example, pay $100 on the first day of each month.
• Amount due up to a fixed amount, and send email if over that fixed amount.

Amount defines how much the recurring payment is going to pay for each payment. The amount can be a fixed amount or the amount due. The amount due is that of the loaded bill.

Pay date defines when each payment is going to be cleared (money transfers). The pay date can be a fixed date or a date before it is due.

For monthly payments, if day 29, 30, or 31 is selected, and that day does not exist for a particular month, then the pay date defaults to the last day of that month. For example, specifying day 31 of each month ensures that payments are made at the last day of each month.

The effective period defines when a recurring payment starts and ends. A payment is made if its pay date is within the effective period (inclusive). If the pay date is after the end date of the effective period, then the recurring payment is deactivated. By default, a recurring payment only starts tomorrow. This is done so that all bills that arrive up to and including today are considered paid, so recurring payment must not pay these bills a second time.

Each bill as a unique ID called the bill ID, which is from the statement number of each statement record.

Oracle Billing Insight prevents a bill from being paid twice.

After a user creates a recurring payment, that user is not permitted to change the payment amount from fixed to amount due, or to change the pay date from fixed to before due date, or conversely. When a recurring payment starts (which is when the first recurring payment has been made), the start date of the recurring payment cannot be modified.

CAUTION:  Recurring payment supports only one customer account for each biller. Recurring payment does not support multiple customer accounts with a single biller.

Recurring payments consist of actions at the front-end (UI) and back end (Command Center jobs). The UI allows a user to insert, update, and delete a recurring payment, and the back end pmtRecurPayment job makes the payment.

The recurring payment feature involves a great deal of business logic.

Recurring Payment Assumptions

The recurring payment feature assumes that the bill balances are accumulative. The bill for this billing cycle includes the balance of the bill from previous billing cycle, and the later bill has a due date after that of the previous bill.

Recurring payment also assumes that each bill has a date indicating the chronological order of bills. This is usually the date when the bill arrives. For example, the column UPDATE_DATE in the EDX_ACCOUNT_LATEST_STATEMENT table can be used to indicate the chronological order of arriving bills. In the case of external billing software, other dates such as statement date can be used for this purpose. When recurring payment synchronizes with the Command Center or other billing software, it must retrieve the latest bill issued between the last_process_time and current time. This chronological date of bills (UPDATE_DATE or statement date) is used to guarantee that functionality.

Negative and Zero Bill Amounts

If a bill has a negative balance, then no payment is made. Instead, recurring payment assumes that this credit will roll into the balance of next bill. However, a zero dollar payment will be made if the balance is zero.

Due Dates

If a recurring payment is not a fixed date and fixed amount, then it must have a due date. The due date is used to decide which bill is the latest one to pay. You must load the due date or a date to use that is equivalent to the due date.