Installment Payment Processing

An installment payment is processed as a purchased item cycle.

Installment payment processing is similar to recurring processing and is triggered at the beginning of each cycle. If there are insufficient funds, installment payment processing fails, but can be triggered on the same cycle if there is a balance top-up or maintenance. Finance contract principal payments do not affect the installment amount or the remaining installments. The installment amount is part of the contract and can only be updated by the operator through the ContractOfferModify APIs. For more information about the ContractOfferModify APIs, see the discussions about MtxRequestSubscriberModifyOffer, MtxRequestGroupModifyOffer, and MtxRequestDeviceModifyOffer in MATRIXX Subscriber Management API.

If the recurring processing is successful, an MtxRecurringEvent is generated and the GL revenue recognition for this installment payment is set to immediate.

If the installment charge cannot be paid at the end of the cycle, it is considered a missed installment and the amount is charged to a contract debt balance, an MtxMissedContractChargeEvent event is generated to indicate a failed installment payment. In this case, the number of installments in the contract is reduced, but the outstanding principal remains the same.

A late charge is applied after the late charge grace period has passed in a failed recurring cycle. The late charge is calculated based on terms of the contract and is applied to the late charge debt balance after the grace period. An MtxContractLateChargeEvent event is generated when the late charge is applied. The recurring processing can subsequently succeed in the same cycle, but the late charge is incurred.

A subscription management operation, ContractDebtPayment, is used to pay off debt accumulated in the contract late charge and recurring charge debt balances. When paid off through this operation, an MtxContractDebtPaymentEvent event is generated and a notification is automatically sent to the subscriber or group.

The contract debt and contract late charge balances are simple, post-paid, currency balances with an unlimited credit limit and cannot be overridden.

Events and Notifications

Finance contract offer events and notifications are generated when processing finance contracts. For example, an event is generated with an updated contract state. When you renegotiate a contract, an MtxPurchasedItemModifyEvent Event Detail Records (EDRs) is generated that includes the owner ID of the owner of the contract and arrays of offers and bundles that have been modified. For information about finance contract events, see the discussion about event fields in MATRIXX Integration. For information about finance contract notifications, see the discussion about notification message fields in MATRIXX Integration.