IN THIS ARTICLE:
Learn how to process a payment using payment information stored on the customer's account (autopay). Also, learn how to run the bulk payments task under TRANSACTIONS>PAYMENTS to apply credits or collect payments for multiple customers at once.

• Single Payments
• Bulk Payments (or Apply Credit in Bulk)
  • What is the Payments task?
  • How the Filters Work
  • Running the Payments Task
  • Record Keeping

Single Payments

If you would like to manually create a payment for a single customer, use the New Payment window and select the first payment type, which will reflect either "echeck" or "credit card on file".

• For more detailed instructions on creating single payments, visit our "How Do I Create a New Payment?" document.

NOTE: the option to make a payment using the “Credit Card on File” type will be disabled if the saved payment method is flagged as Invalid.

Bulk Payments (or Apply Credit in Bulk)

Account-wide billing tasks are performed from the TRANSACTIONS page in iClassPro. For each of your business' billing cycles, we have a list of recommended tasks available in the Billing Operations Checklist to create a smooth billing process for your employees and customers to follow.

What is the Payments task?

From the TRANSACTIONS>PAYMENTS area, there are two different auto payment tasks that can be performed:

• Apply Credits and Unapplied Payments - This task will find all customers with both one or more outstanding charges and unused account credit in their ledgers, then apply the account credit to those charges to reduce their overall outstanding balance.
  • For this reason, we recommend running this option before using the "Charge from Merchant Accounts" option.
• Charge from Merchant Accounts - this task will process any stored credit card or echeck information on file for customers with outstanding charges.
  • The "Charge from Merchant Account" option will only ever look at the "Primary" payment method linked to the Primary Guardian on the family's account. If there is no "Primary" payment method set for the Primary Guardian, the system will consider that the family does not have autopay enabled and therefore will not be included when the task is run.

Filter options such as Charge Categories, family status, charge due dates, minimum balances, line item types, and keywords give your business the ability to narrow down which customers are having payments processed based on which charges are currently outstanding on their accounts.

NOTE: The Charge from Merchant Accounts task will attempt to collect the full outstanding balance shown in the preview, regardless of account credit that may be available. This is why it is important to run the "Apply Credits and Unapplied Payments" task before processing stored payment information (to prevent over-billing customers).

How the Filters Work

Processing for One or More Charge Categories

When processing payments, you may wish to include only charges related to a specific tuition charge category such as "August Tuition" or a "Team Uniforms" category or perhaps even both. The payments task allows you to do exactly that!

To choose a single Charge Category, select the desired option from the drop-down menu. Selecting multiple Charge Categories in the list will allow you to find families with at least one of those types of charges outstanding. Accounts which have one or more outstanding charges with any of the selected Charge Categories will show in the preview.

Bill Filters

The Bill filter provides three options which are used to process payments for customers with charges that are:

• Due On or Before a specific date (date field below).
• Due On a specific date (date field below).
• All Outstanding Charges (no date field).

These options can come in handy when you have multiple billing schedules with different charge and due dates.

For example, if you allow customers to choose to sign up for either a "1st of the month" billing schedule or a "15th of the month" billing schedule, you will likely issue charges around the 20th of the prior month. This allows your business time to notify customers of their charges and make alternative payment plans if necessary.

Each set of charges will be run separately in the Class Tuitions task, where you will designate the due date of either the 1st or the 15th.

On the 1st, in order to process payments for only the charges due on the first, you would use "Due On" with the first of the month as the date.

Then on the 15th of the month, if there are still customers with charges from the 1st that are unpaid, you will likely want to choose "Due On or Before" with the 15th as the date to include families with either set of charges in the payments process task.

Selecting the Right Line Item Types

Line item types are used in iClassPro to help track and prevent duplicate charges for items such as tuitions, parties, and anniversary charges. Other items, such as uniforms, meet fees or other misc purchases are tracked using the "Other" line item type. When processing payments, you can distinguish which line item types to include in the results to avoid billing for miscellaneous items which are not covered in your billing authorization under policies.

Running the Payments Task

Collecting bulk payments from stored payment information is done from the Transactions page. Go to TRANSACTIONS>PAYMENTS and follow the instructions below.

1. Select your Auto Payments Task. (We highly recommend running the Apply Credits task first before using the other two options.)
2. (Optional) Choose one or more Charge Categories to restrict the payments process task to only those charges. Use the "Select All" option to not restrict the search to specific charges. (NOTE: If you need to collect payments for Charge Categories that have expired, you will need to toggle the "Expired" switch on the Charge Category drop-down menu.)
   
3. Select whether to process payments for Active, Inactive or All family accounts using the Family Status filter.
4. Select the Bill option that will best fit the intentions of the payments process task. If requested, enter the Due Date in the field below.
5. Enter a Minimum Payment Amount to be eligible for the payments process task (some businesses do not draft for outstanding charges below a certain amount to minimize the impact of processing fees).
6. Choose the Charge Types to process payments for (Class Tuition, Camp Tuition, Parties, Anniversary, and Other).
7. (Optional) Select Family or Student Keywords to restrict the individuals eligible to be included in the payments process task. Accounts linked to any one or more of the selected keywords will be shown in the preview.
8. (Optional) If you have chosen the "Charge From Merchant Account" Auto Payments Task, you can enable the following option(s):
   • Email Receipts For Successful Payments - if enabled, the system will send a receipt to the family's primary email address when a successful payment is processed. (This email can be customized under SETTINGS>SETUP>GENERAL SETTINGS>EMAIL TEMPLATES>ICLASSPRO>Autopay Receipt.)
   • Email Receipts For Failed Payments - if enabled, the system will send a receipt to the family's primary email address when a payment is declined. (This email can be customized under SETTINGS>SETUP>GENERAL SETTINGS>EMAIL TEMPLATES>ICLASSPRO>Autopay Declined.)
9. Click Preview. The preview will generate in your background tasks for safe keeping but should open automatically if you do not navigate away from the page.
10. At the top of the preview, is a Filter Summary. Click Show to review all filters from the previous page.
11. Review the customers that meet the qualifications to have their payments processed. Families with a box highlighted in blue will have a payment processed using the saved payment information on file. If you make corrections to accounts, you must run a new preview to see the changes.
12. The system will display a red warning in the Payment Preview screen if the payment type is flagged as Invalid.
    
    While the payment will automatically be deselected, it will still be possible to manually check the payment and attempt it anyway if you wish to do so.
13. When you are ready, click Process.

Processing payments can take some time. You can review the progress of the task in your background task.

Record Keeping

Once complete, the task status will read "Done" and a down arrow will appear next to the task.

Clicking the down arrow will take you to a summary page of all payments that were attempted to be processed and the filters used for the preview. Failed attempts to process will be listed with an error message detailing why the payment failed.

The Payments Process result will include the following columns:

• Family
• Type
  • CC_MERCHANT
  • ECHECK
• Payment Status
  • For information regarding the various statuses, see our "What Do The Payment Status Indicators Mean?" document.

The results can be searched by any of these terms.

To save this information, click Save to CSV. This document will also generate in your background tasks. Once complete, click on the document icon or down arrow to save the file for your records.