1. Configuring and Collecting Payments
  2. Setting Up Payment Installments

14 Setting Up Payment Installments

Learn how to set up your customers to pay their bills in installments in Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management (BRM).

Topics in this document:

About Installments

Your customers can pay for the amount they owe in multiple installment payments over time. The amount your customer owes can be divided into equal or non-equal individual installments. For example, a $1,200 bill could be divided equally into six monthly individual installments of $200, or unequally into one $600 individual installment and two monthly individual installments of $300.

About Defining the Terms for an Installment Plan

You define the terms for each installment plan that your company offers by creating an installment specification. An installment specification defines the minimum amount for an individual installment, the types of customers and bills that are eligible for the installment plan, its validity dates, and the number of unequal individual installments that are allowed. For example, an installment specification could specify the following:

  • The minimum amount for an individual installment is $100.

  • Only customers from California (or a specific area) that owe more than $1000 are eligible for an installment plan.

  • The installment plan is valid for a certain period. For example, from January through June.

  • Up to two unequal individual installments are allowed, but they must be scheduled at least 20 days apart.

About Creating Installments for Customers

An installment schedule is an agreement of payment between you and your customer. The customer agrees to pay the due amount in the number of installments at certain intervals. Based on the number of installments, the due amount is divided into appropriate individual installment amount.

The installment schedule uses an installment specification while creating the installments. The installment schedule is created on the bill or bill items.

By default, the total amount owed for the installment schedule is divided equally into the specified number of monthly installment payments. However, the CSRs can manually adjust the installment’s effective date and amount owed for the individual installments. By default, the current date is considered as the effective date for the first installment. The due date gets calculated based on the interval specified in the customer’s payment agreement. The installment charge is billed immediately or is billed in the next billing cycle.

Note:

If the individual installments amounts are changed, ensure that the total installment amount of the installment schedule is equal to the total amount owed. For example, if the bill amount is $1000, you create an installment schedule of $200 X 5 installments. The customer can decide to pay $500 in one installment, $200 in the next, $100 in the next, and $200 in the last installment. BRM allows this as long as the final bill amount adds up to $1000, the final bill amount. However, if the installment amounts together do not match up to the final bill amount, you will get an error.

The following scenarios explain how the installment schedule can be created:

  • A customer purchases a device for $1,200 and wants to pay the amount in installments. The customer creates an installment schedule to pay for the amount owed in 12 equal individual installments of $100 per month.

  • A customer has a bill amount of $2,400 and wants to pay the bill amount in non-equal installments. Based on the eligibility criteria, the customer can pay $1200 as the initial payment amount and then pay the remaining $1200 amount in 3 equal installments of $400 each.

About Installment Status

When your customer creates an installment schedule, Billing Care creates an installment schedule and an individual installment for each scheduled installment payment. For example, if a customer creates an installment schedule with three installment payments, Billing Care creates one installment schedule and three individual installments.

Billing Care indicates the status of an installment schedule with the following:

  • Open: The customer has created an installment schedule and owes a balance.

  • Broken: The customer missed all of the installment payments. That is, all individual installments have a Broken status.

  • Canceled: The installment schedule is canceled.

  • Finished: The customer has paid off the full amount.

Billing Care indicates the status of an individual installment with the following:

  • Open: The individual installment has been scheduled and not charged.

  • Charged: The installment charge has been added to the customer’s bill.

  • Broken: The customer missed paying an installment payment. The customer’s bill is sent to collections.

  • Paid: The individual installment is paid in full.

  • Canceled: The individual installment is canceled.

About Partial Installment Payments

When a customer pays a partial installment amount, the individual installment remains in Charged status and the customer still owes the remaining balance by the due date. If the payment for the individual installment is not paid in full by the due date, the individual installment status is changed to Broken.

About Missed Installment Payments

When a customer misses paying an installment payment by the due date, the individual installment status changes to Broken. If it is the last installment, the overall installment schedule status also changes to Broken. If the payment is not made, the collection process takes care of the next steps as per the defined rules.

About Canceling an Installment Schedule

If a customer decides to pay any remaining amount for the installment in one shot, CSRs can cancel the remaining installments. CSRs can cancel any installment schedule with Open status. When an installment schedule is canceled, the pin_installment_status_change utility changes the status of the installment schedule from Open to Canceled. The utility also changes the status of all Open individual installments to Canceled. However, the status of any Charged or Paid individual installments is not changed and the customer still owes the amount from Charged individual installments by their original due date. BRM automatically applies the remaining balance from all the Canceled individual installments to the customer’s bill in progress as a one-time charge.

For example, a customer has a bill due amount with 6 installment payments. After paying a few (or none) of the installments, the customer decides to cancel the remaining installments by paying the remaining due amount in full. When a customer raises such a request, the CSR can cancel the installment schedule and the installment status is changed to Canceled.

Note:

CSRs can only cancel the installments that are in Open status.

The following table shows an example where a customer has an open installment schedule with four individual installments. If the customer decides to cancel the installment schedule on April 10, the status of the installment schedule is changed to Canceled and the status of the individual installments are changed as shown in Table 14-1.

Table 14-1 Sample Individual Installment Status

Installment Number Effective Date Billing Due Date Amount Owed Status Before Cancellation Status After Cancellation
1 March 1 March 15 $100 Paid Paid
2 April 1 April 15 $100 Charged Charged
3 May 1 May 15 $100 Open Canceled
4 June 1 June 15 $100 Open Canceled

In this case, the customer is still required to pay the second installment of $100 by April 15th. BRM adds a $200 charge for the canceled installments to the customer’s bill in progress.

Setting Up Installments on Your System

To set up BRM to support installments, do the following:

  1. Create installment specifications in Billing Care. See "Installments" in Billing Care Online Help.

  2. Create nightly cron jobs to run the following utilities:

  3. Generate reminder messages for your customers a specified amount of time before their installment payment is due or their installment plan ends:

  4. Specify the number of days before an installment’s due date or end date that a notification event is generated. See "Configuring Installment Notification Days".

  5. Perform any customization to the installment process by using the policy opcodes. See "Installment Opcode Workflows" in BRM Opcode Guide.

  6. Create an installment schedule in Billing Care for customers who want to pay a bill in installments. See "Creating an Installment Schedule" in Billing Care Online Help.

Applying Installment Charges

The pin_installments utility applies the charges for an individual installment to your customer’s bills on the specified effective date. If the installment flag is set to Bill Now Bill, billing is triggered immediately. If that flag is not set, the installment charges are applied to the next regular bill.

For example, a customer’s installment due date is April 1st. On the scheduled date, pin_installments changes the installment status from Open to Charged.

Example for the utility command:

pin_installments -verbose

Updating an Installment Status

The pin_installment_status_change utility changes the status of the individual installment of your customer’s bills, on the specified effective date.

When the payment is not received by the installment due date or when a customer makes only a partial payment of the bill amount, pin_installment_status_change changes the installment status from Charged to Broken. The customer’s billing profile is sent to collections management to take any further actions.

pin_installment_status_change changes the status of an open installment to Canceled. Any remaining installment amount is included in the next bill.

When all the installments are made and no more payments due, the utility changes the installment status to Finished.

Once the installment status is changed from Open to Charged, pin_installment_status_change changes the status to Broken, Canceled, or Paid.

Example for the utility command:

pin_installment_status_change -verbose

Sending Installment Reminders (Patch Set 5)

Note:

To generate installment reminders using Patch Set 6 and later, see "Sending Messages to Customers through External Notification Applications" in BRM Managing Customers.

You can send reminder messages to your customers several days before their installment payment is due or their installment plan ends. In Patch Set 5, you do so by running the pin_installment_notifications utility. The utility searches for all installments that are due in a specified number of days from today and then generates notifications for them.

You specify the number of days before an installment is due or ends in which to generate a notification by using the DueDateReminderNotification and EndDateReminderNotification business parameters. See "Configuring Installment Notification Days".

For example, if DueDateReminderNotification is set to 4 and you run pin_installment_notifications on June 1, the utility generates notifications for all installment payments that are due on June 5. Likewise, if EndDateReminderNotification is set to 10 and you run pin_installment_notifications on June 1, the utility generates notifications for all installment plans that end on June 11.

Example for installment payments that are due a specified number of days from today:

pin_installment_notifications -verbose -due_date

Example for installment plans that end a specified number of days from today:

pin_installment_notifications -verbose -end_date

For more information about the utility's syntax and parameters, see "pin_installment_notifications".

Configuring Installment Notification Days

You can configure the installment notification parameters and decide when to send the installment notifications.

To configure the DueDateReminderNotification and the EndDateReminderNotification business parameters, run the pin_bus_params utility.

For more information about this utility, see "pin_bus_params" in BRM Developer's Guide.

To configure the installment notification parameters:

  1. Go to BRM_home/sys/data/config.

  2. Create an XML file from the /config/business_params object: 

    pin_bus_params -r BusParamsInstallment bus_params_Installment.xml

  3. In the file, change the number of days as required.

    <DueDateReminderNotification>5</DueDateReminderNotification>
    <EndDateReminderNotification>3</EndDateReminderNotification>

  4. Save the file as bus_params_Installment.xml.

  5. Load the XML file into the BRM database:

    pin_bus_params bus_params_Installment.xml

  6. Stop and restart the CM.

  7. (Multischema systems only) Run the pin_multidb script with the -R CONFIG parameter. For more information, see "pin_multidb" in BRM System Administrator's Guide.

Customizing Installments

You can customize installments in the following ways:

  • Prepare the installment schedule specifications by using the PCM_OP_INSTALLMENT_POL_PREP_SCHEDULE_SPEC policy opcode.

  • Validate the installment schedule specifications by using the PCM_OP_INSTALLMENT_POL_VALID_SCHEDULE_SPEC policy opcode.

  • Validate the installment by using the PCM_OP_INSTALLMENT_POL_VALID_INSTALLMENT policy opcode.

  • Prepare the installment by using the PCM_OP_INSTALLMENT_POL_PREP_ INSTALLMENT policy opcode.

For more information, see "Installment Opcode Workflows" in BRM Opcode Guide.