Setting up predefined schedules of recurring payments for events or memberships

[andyg8]

I initially posted this in the Using Civimember forum, but haven't heard anything from there so am posting it here. Hopefully I've written it a bit clearer here:

Is there a way to set up a schedule of recurring payments, like in Paypal? There you can specify a trial period, an initial payment amount, a regular payment amount, an interval, and the number of intervals. We'd like to specify a variety of these and give them as choices for events and memberships.

We'd like to create schedules like that for training courses held over a couple of years. We've looked through the documentation and may have missed it, but haven't found anything yet. We can see that it is possible to give people the choice to pay a certain amount for a certain number of installments. Also, we can see that in Memberships we can give the customer the option to pay monthly - or any of a nicely flexible set of intervals - but there is no way to tell the customer how many monthly payments will be deducted, nor require them to pay in intervals. That's just an option they have to select.

But our training courses require us to set up series of pre-defined schedules of payments for participants to choose from, eg:
1. Pay £120 per month for 24 months (24 payments)
2. Pay £720 every 6 months for 2 years (4 payments)
3. Pay £1440 every year for 2 years (2 payments)
4. Pay £2880 now.

Paypal easily supports this - and more: you can setup trial periods as well as a different first installment.

Is it possible to create payment schedules like this for events or memberships?

Thanks for your help.

[petednz]

Nothing like that exists afaik and would take a fair chunk of development time/funds to accomplish i expect. Let it be known if you have those resources and I am sure people will point you  in the right direction.

My only advice would be to understand what Pledge offers you to see if that is something that could be turned to your situation.

[andyg8]

Thanks for your reply on this.

It may well be that we are interested in coding to acheive this. Does anyone have any ideas on the following:

1. A very very rough idea of the areas that would need to be included in the project, to accomplish just the minimum I've mentinoed above, for one Payment Gateway (we'd finish off and then use the WorldPay code).

2. The very very approximate programming hours necessary for that.

If those figures are reachable for us, then we could explore in more detail.

Thanks for your help.

[Shai]

Did any development ever happen on this?

[andyg8]

We are now within a few months of looking at this... and in the meantime, any help or ideas before then would be greatly appreciated!

[adixon]

My new iATS Payments extension https://civicrm.org/extensions/iats-payments uses a civicrm job to manage the recurring contributions, it might be a useful place to start.

The mechanism for triggering the payment is pretty straightforward, the challenge for this issue might be around creating a nice administrative interface for defining the schedule.