Importing Payments

Terms

The following terms refer to items that only will exist in Presspoint after a transaction has been processed.

Receipt Items in Presspoint refer to the individual items that are acquired by a visitor on your site. If a visitor added three items to their cart (a t-shirt, a donation and a ticket to an event) they will pay for the items together in a single transaction or order, but Presspoint will store those individual items as Receipt Items on the visitor’s account so that you can see and search for exactly what someone paid for at anytime you like.

Payment Plans refer to a special financial object that manages the scheduling of when payments need to be made by a user for a specific thing (eg. purchase or a donation). Plans can be of either type; Recurring (regular, schedule payments), Installment (a pre-set, finite schedule of future-dated payments) or Non-expiring (one-time payment that is “active” until manually terminated). Payment Plans contain individual Receipt Items which are made while a plan is active and which behave like regularReceipt Items in regards to status and payment methods – the key difference is that they are contained within a payment plan.

As such, you can think of Payment Plans as a “parent” and the Receipt Items as the “children” within the context of a plan. When Receipt Items are made independent of a plan, they can be thought of as a “parent” with no children.

Both Receipt Items and Payment Plans have specific fields which govern how they operate within Presspoint and how they relate to other circumstances like accounting programs and merchant gateways.

Importing

When importing legacy data you may choose to import similar constructs of individual Receipt Items or Payment Plans that contain pre-existing Receipt Items. Presspoint supports importing both types of data. To proceed, you should always import Payment Plans first.

Whenever you import a Payment Plan or a Receipt Item, the resulting export will contain both the ID of the user you attached the plan or item to as well as the new ID of the plan or item. When importing Payment Plans, you will want to use the new ID generated to match your “child” Receipt Items. Alternatively, you can import your Payment Plans with a unique ID in the “Import ID” field and match on that ID when importing “child” Receipt Items.

Regardless of the scenario, you will want to observe the fields below. You do not need to pre-label the columns of your CSV. Rather, you will select the fields during the import process and the fields have been named below as you will see them in the dropdown options during import.

Special Fields

Unique User ID. If matching with a user, you can include the WordPress User ID or email address or any other similar unique identifier that you have pre-set. If you are not matching with a user then you should at least include an email address. If you do not include a unique field representing an individual or organization, Presspoint will create a default individual for you.

General Fields

Creation Date. Required. This is the date either the Item or the Plan was created.

Title. Required. If you include this, it will be appended to the Item or Plan description when viewed and is searchable in the database.

Note. If you include this, it will be appended to the Item or Plan view and is searchable in the database.

Item Parent. Optional. If you are importing Receipt Items to be added to Payment Plans OR you are importing Adjustments to be added to Receipt Items, you must include this and set the option describing which type of parent ID this will match with. See Importing section above.

Payment Method. The method to be used for payment. Please consult your installation Commerce settings under Gateways for the appropriate codes to use.

Status. The status of an Item or Plan. For items: “completed” or “pending”. For plans: “active”, “suspended”, “expired”, “canceled”, “concluded”.

Currency. The currency to apply. If omitted defaults to system settings.

Item ID. The unique WordPress post ID of the item being purchased or donated to.

Variable Item ID. The unique WordPress post ID of the variation relative to the item being purchased or donated to.

SKU. The unique sku for the item being purchased or donated to.

Amount. The amount that should be charged. For plans this should be either the recurring amount for recurring plans or, for installments, it should be the total value.

Adjustment Amount. The amount to apply as a discount on each item within a recurring plan or the historical discount applied to an original installment plan.

Import ID. If there is a unique record number for the plan, enter it here. This will be useful if you are also importing legacy child payments as you can match on this ID during the import process for the receipt items.

Payment Plans Only

Plan Type. Recurring (code: “recurring”), Installment (code: “installment”) or  Non-Expiring (code: “perpetual”) to set the type of plan.

Renewal Term. For Recurring plans only, this is the period by which it renews. Codes are: “day”, “month”, “year”

Renewal Length. For Recurring plans only, this is the number of times the item will recur. If empty or “0” plans will continue to recur until manually concluded. If you include a number (eg. 3) then the plan will recur that many times, creating a payment according to the Renewal Term before concluding.

Auto Renew. For all plans, if this is set to true (code: “yes”) and the payment method supports automatic payments then when an item is ready to be completed, Presspoint will attempt to collect the funds automatically. Similarly, if set to false (code: “no”) Presspoint will not attempt to collect funds on automatically. If not included in the import, the default rules will apply upwards with first preference given to the original object purchased/donated to and then, finally, to the global commerce setting. If the suffix “_user” is set as part of the code, then the payee has the option of setting the preference themselves as well.

Resolve Balances. For all plans, if this is set to true (code: “yes”) and the payment method supports automatic payments then when an item is ready to be completed and there is a balance greater than the amount scheduled, Presspoint will attempt to collect all past owed amounts automatically. Similarly, if set to false (code: “no”) Presspoint will only attempt to collect the most recent amount owed. If not included in the import, the default rules will apply upwards with first preference given to the original object purchased/donated to and then, finally, to the global commerce setting. If the suffix “_user” is set as part of the code, then the payee has the option of setting the preference themselves as well.

Next Payment Due. This is the date that the next payment will be attempted. For installment plans, this will generally be the next scheduled installment that is due. For Non-expiring plans, this should be empty.

Last Payment Scheduled. If a plan is currently in a grace period due to a late payment this will be the date that the payments was supposed to be made. The difference between this date and the current date determines how many times a payment will be attempted. Once payment is successful, this will be the base date that the schedule will return to for recurring payments.

Payment Attempts. This is the number of times a late payment has currently been tried. Once this is count matches the limit set in preferences, the plan will be set to “Expired” and attempts to continue to collect payment will cease.