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Rent collection
Setting up a payment plan
How a tenant who is behind can spread a balance across installments, how you approve or decline the plan, and how paying an installment reduces the rent they owe.
The short answer
Set up a payment plan by defining the balance, installment dates, and terms you approve, then keeping every scheduled payment tied to the tenant ledger. A payment plan is an owner decision; Aptoria helps document and track it rather than deciding the arrangement for you.
Workflow at a glance
1
How a payment plan works
2
Approving or declining
3
How installments reduce the balance
How a payment plan works
A payment plan lets a tenant who cannot pay a balance all at once spread it across several scheduled installments. The tenant proposes the plan from their portal — a total amount and a set of dated installments that add up to it — and it comes to you as a proposal to approve or decline. A plan is never put in place without your sign-off.
This keeps a partial-payment arrangement structured and visible instead of an informal "pay me when you can." The installments and their due dates are tracked, and the plan's status is always clear: proposed, active, completed, declined, or cancelled.
Approving or declining
A proposed plan shows up for your decision. Approving it activates the schedule; declining asks for a reason so the tenant understands why. Because a plan changes how a real balance gets collected, this is a decision Aptoria keeps with a person rather than automating — the agent can surface the proposal and the context, but you decide.
Either party can cancel a plan that has not finished, and every step — proposed, approved, declined, cancelled, each installment, completion — is written to your audit trail with the amount and who acted.
1
The tenant proposes a plan from their portal: a total and dated installments that sum to it.
2
The proposal appears for your review with the amount and reason.
3
Approve to activate the schedule, or decline with a short reason.
4
As installments come in, mark each one paid; the balance updates as you go.
How installments reduce the balance
Marking an installment paid credits it against the original rent period it was meant to cover, so the underlying balance actually goes down. That matters for what runs alongside: a period being paid down through an active plan is not treated as simply unpaid, which keeps late fees and reminders from firing on rent the tenant is paying on the agreed schedule.
When the final installment is marked paid, the plan is complete and the period is settled. If a tenant falls off the schedule, the plan is visible for you to cancel or renegotiate, so nothing slips through untracked.
Related articles
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Handling a failed or returned payment
What happens when a rent payment is declined or returned: how Aptoria retries, notifies the tenant, surfaces the NSF fee for your approval, and stops autopay after a hard reversal.
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How late fees are calculated
Your late-fee policy sets the fee, then Aptoria clamps it to your state's grace period and cap so an automated fee is never larger or sooner than the law allows.
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Using the approval queue
How proposed actions reach you to approve or deny, and how the soft-commit window lets you intercept an automatic action before it lands.
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