With standard billing, you can setup recurring charges, applied on a schedule, and run periodically (monthly, quarterly, annually). With Advanced Billing, you can add additional line items, add payment options such as pay monthly, quarterly, or annually, and add service charges to payments that are made outside of your standard cycle.
For example:
Community A charges dues annually of $1,000.
Payments are due January 15th in full.
An option to pay monthly is requested by certain homes.
With Advanced Billing, you can enable a monthly payment option but add a $10 per payment service fee (frequently chosen by HOAs where additional overhead, reminders, and postage are incurred for such frequent billing cycles).
👉 Step 1: Choose the Billing Period
Visit Financial Dashboard - Billing & Collections - Create Charges and choose Pay Over Time
Billing Period: This is the period (usually annual) for which this dues cycle covers. While you may accept payments monthly, quarterly, or annual, you are choosing the period for which the amount remains stable.
⚡️ Note: As you decide on charges, the system will prompt you if you have not enabled Billing Policies for the specific charge types. You are not required to enable these - but they do come in handy if you want pre-set late charges or interest on certain late payment situations.
👉 Set Billing Policies in Billing & Collections - See Billing Policies
A note on Billing Policies: Billing policies are attached to each individual charge created by the billing system. The automated billing that you're setting up is a single charge (if annual as default) or a series of charges (if monthly or quarterly) that are to be applied at set intervals according to your choices. If you set up monthly billing, even with annual or quarterly options, then your billing policy for late fees will be saved alongside each charge.
👉 Step 2: Set Charge Line Items
You can set multiple recurring line items (or just one)
Total Amount for the Period: This is the TOTAL for the year (or quarter if you re-do your charge cycle every quarter (unusual).
Examples:
1) If your annual dues are $,1200, set $1,200 as the amount here and the system will do the math for monthly or quarterly payments.
2) If your annual amount is $1200 but you are setting this up in May, for a June start to billing, choose $700 ($1200 / 12 * 7). The system will prompt you for proration if you set the period to less than a full year. You can use that feature or set it up yourself.
👉 Step 3: Choose your Payment Options
This is where you can customize your payment and allow for payment in full on a specific day and add a service fee per installment, or leave it at zero. You can set up quarterly or monthly and mark any one of them as a default.
⚡️ Special Circumstances:
There are occasions where a specific payment option, like monthly, is only made available to certain properties. When you select the payment option monthly and set the due date and any service fee, you can then drop down property availability and exclude or specifically include properties that are eligible for this payment frequency.
Example:
The standard for the community is annual one-time payments due January 15th. However, your CC&Rs provide that any homeowner may petition for a hardship payment plan and elect to pay monthly. You would not then make the monthly option available to all units or homes in the community. You would select monthly, attach any permitted service fee or leave blank, and then select the one or few properties who have petitioned and are enabled for monthly payments
👉 Step 4: Choose the "Who" for this billing setup.
Your standard option would be, of course, to choose "All properties", and all properties would be treated the same. However, if you are setting up different charges for different groups, you can do that here.
