Scheduled payments are now smarter than ever! In Thursday's update, we released some changes that will increase the versatility of what scheduled payments can do.
If you schedule a new payment, or open an existing one, you'll notice some changes at the top.
The changes should be fairly self-explanatory, but let's take a minute to run through them anyway.
When it comes to picking the collection date for the scheduled payment, you can now select a number of days before the arrival date instead of a specific date. This is useful because it means that the collection date will automatically change if the arrival date changes. Before, if you changed the dates of the booking, you'd have to manually update your scheduled payments too or risk having the payment collected on the wrong date. Now, you only need to set "1 day before the arrival" (or whatever) and it will occur on the correct day even if the arrival date changes in the future.
The amount area was similarly updated. Previously, you could select "the remaining balance" but that only stored the total owed as it existed at the moment you saved the scheduled payment. If, sometime later on, the remaining balance changed, the scheduled payment would still try to collect the original amount. Now, when you select "whatever the remaining balance is (currently $x)" it tells the scheduled payment to collect the total owed at the point of collection.
We've also added a calendar button to the right of the date field. The date field always opened a calendar in the past but it wasn't obvious until you set focus to the field.
By default, bookings that are created via the guest form use the new options - Days Before Arrival and Remaining Balance. The Days Before Arrival value is based on your settings for the associated quote or property.
This update removes an additional step of work in your booking process. No longer do you have to adjust the collection date or amount on a scheduled payment just because the dates or charges changed on the booking.
