Automatic Payments

If a customer has a payment method with the default_payment_method flag set to true on one of their stored payment methods, that payment method will be automatically charged on the due date of any invoice that they are assigned to with an outstanding balance.

See customer default payment method

Automatic Retry

If an invoice remains open with an outstanding balance for a customer with a default billing method enabled, the payment will be re-attempted for up to 5 days after the due date.

Note: Any declined transactions will create a payment line item with a zero amount on the associated invoice.

Disabling Automatic Payments

To disable automatic payment attempts on a invoice that's within 5 days from the due date you can update the status on the invoice to canceled, delete the invoice, or disable the customer's default payment method.

To stop future automatic payments for a billing schedule you'll need to either disable the customer's default payment method, delete the billing schedule, or update the end_date on the billing schedule to the current date or a date in the past.

Watch for automatic payments

You can subscribe to webhooks or use the query api to monitor or review any automatic payments and payment attempts.

Webhooks

Watch for payment triggers in real-time using the automatic_payment webhook. If you want to monitor both automatic and manually authorized payments, the payment webhook will fire for both types of payments.

See webhooks

Querying for Automatic Payments

Query for automatic payments

curl "https://api.payload.co/transactions/?type=payment&trigger=automatic" \
    -u secret_key_3bW9JMZtPVDOfFNzwRdfE:

payments = pl.Payment.filter_by( trigger='automatic' ).all()

payments = Payload::Payment.
    filter_by(
        trigger: 'automatic'
    ).
    all()

<?php
$payments = Payload\Transaction::filter_by(
    array('trigger'=>'automatic', 'type'=>'payment'))->all();
?>

const payments = await pl.select(pl.Payment).filterBy({ trigger: 'automatic' })

var payments = await pl.Payment.FilterBy(new { trigger = "automatic" }).AllAsync();

To query for automatic payments, you can use the hidden attribute trigger which is set to automatic for any automatic payment attempt.

To use polling to find the most recent automatic payments, you can use the trigger filter along with a greater than query operator on the created_at attribute. See below for more information on using query operators:

See conditional queries