Schedule more than 2 payments for checks

I have a returning customer that pays by check, she books an entire month and I want to be able to "Schedule" the "request for payment," as I understand I can't use the "schedule payment" unless they are using/have a card on file. Since it is for an entire month in peak season, I like to offer my guests the option of making 3 payments instead of 2. Can I schedule the requests, or do I just have to set up a reminder for them? I can do that in PayPal but it seems like I should be able to do it right here.

You can manually schedule reminder emails on specific dates under the Email tab. Or, if you have no payments scheduled and payment reminders turned on, they'll be sent on OwnerRez' schedule, which can't currently be customized.

I see that I can't customize them, even if I make a new template for example "extra payments" as I would like to be able to create the email to be scheduled AND add the personalized PP link for payment/invoice. I can't "save" the email once I've opened it to insert the PP link, the only option is to "send" or cancel.

I guess I will continue to use the PP option for scheduling payments and do a work around. I can't be the only one who would like the option of having 3 payments? As there are expensive properties that rent monthly by the shore, and surely others would like to be able to offer that option?

Yes, we have a feature for more than 2 payments in the works, no ETA yet.

In the meantime, what you can do to schedule and customize these emails per booking is use a custom field definition: https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/custom-fields. I see you've got a couple of fields in there already for the guest to fill out when they're reserving. This will be similar, but instead of the guest filling it in you'll set that Show During Quote to NO and then fill it in yourself prior to scheduling the email. Then that scheduled email will pick up the values for that particular booking.

Since you want 3, you can leave in the current payment reminder for the final payment. Just schedule this new one in between as the second payment.

I created an example Schedule Additional Payment Request template in your account and two new fields -- BXADDPAYDATE and BXADDPAYAMT.

To use it:

1) Go to the booking
2) Go to the Custom fields tab of the booking and enter the date and amount. This date is just informational and won't schedule the email. The amount will be used as the payment amount.
3) Go to the Email tab of the booking and schedule the email template

If you want to test out what the email will look like before scheduling it, go to "Email this Guest" and switch to that template -- that'll swap in the merge field values for that booking so you can see.

This is a bit complicated because it's using a custom payment link internally to OwnerRez and overriding the payment amount -- so don't edit that payment link you see in the template.

If you want to use the personalized PP link instead, then create a new BXADDPAYURL field for the link, delete the payment link I added for you and replace it with a reference to your field instead.

Okay, I'll give that a try, thanks. It doesn't happen that often, but I'm glad you are looking into offering it.

Is there any update on being able to offer more than 2 payments?

This is a 2020 post.  It is now 2023. Has OwnerRez been updated to offer more than 2 payments?  Three would be great.  I am hoping this update was made as part of the updates driving the price increases.

Doesn't look like it, as they haven't replied...  :(

Hi, everyone!
 
OwnerRez can't set multiple payments up for you automatically. However, you can schedule them yourself, manually.
 
Here's how to go about that - https://www.ownerrez.com/support/articles/multiple-payments

Also, we still are hoping to add this capability later this year, if we're lucky with the dev schedule.

This would be great news if the dev team could get to implementing this feature this year still!  This would be a very helpful feature for many and there are many OR users who have people book far into the future that would really benefit from this.  We would prefer to have the ability to take different amount or number of payments based on how far out into the future the booking is.  For instance, if the booking is over 8 months in the future, we offer people the ability to book with a $200 deposit.  Then, 4 months before their trip, they need to pay 50% of the trip cost, and the whole amount needs to be collected 30 days before the stay. Let the dev team know that this feature would be super helpful please!

I just started offering payment by check for long-term stays booked well in advance. I chose to offer installments over a variable number of payments as mutually agreed.   And, of course, I ran into the issue that payment scheduling only works with credit cards.  So I did what Chris outlined and set up a custom field for a partial payment amount {BTPARTPAY1}. That is the only field I needed.  I then set up an email template for partial payments by check that uses {BTPARTPAY1} and another that uses the booking field holding the remaining balance {BTOWE}.  Then I scheduled emails for as many partial payments as needed (sorry a little math required) and one for the remaining balance.  Works pretty good!!  Long-term stays are less numerous than the short ones, so I can handle manually setting up these payment requests.