Payment Profiles
Learn how Payment Profiles provide subscription-level payment flexibility and understand the associated constraints and prerequisites.
Payment Profiles enable payment flexibility for subscribers by allowing payment methods to be associated with specific subscriptions. Additionally, payment profiles enable subscriptions to indicate the gateway to be used for electronic payment processing. Payment Profiles segments payments by subscription rather than invoice.
While this allows more flexibility in associating different payment methods or gateways by subscription, it introduces a few constraints you should be aware of:
- Only Usable with Payment Runs: You can only use Payment Profiles with the Payment Run functionality. They are not supported for ad-hoc payments or through direct Payment API operations.
- No Support for Subscription Creation: You cannot populate Payment Profile attributes when creating a subscription. Subscriptions must already exist before you can add these attributes.
The following scenario could result in the invoice not being processed by the payment run:
- Negative Items Are Ignored: When calculating the amount to charge, Payment Profiles only consider positive line items. The system ignores all negative line items, such as discounts, refunds, or negative tax adjustments. This can result in an overcharge because the negative charges that reduce the balance are skipped, causing the payment amount to be greater than the invoice balance.
- Zero-Amount Subscriptions Are Excluded: If a subscription only contains items with a zero balance (e.g., fully discounted services), it will be skipped entirely during the payment run. No payment will be attempted, even if the overall invoice balance is non-zero.
- Subscription-Level Overcharges Can Occur: The system does not redistribute a negative balance from one subscription to offset a positive balance on another. Instead, it will process the positive subscription in full and ignore the negative one, which can lead to an overcharge. You can use the billing feature, Credit Memo, to create a credit memo for negative subscription balances. See the Invoice/Credit Memo generation rule for more detailed information.
Prerequisites
- Configure the required Payment Gateway(s) and applicable Payment Method(s). For more information, see Set up payment gateways and Define and set up payment methods.
- Acquire the Manage Payment Runs permission to create, edit, cancel, stop, and delete payment runs. For more information, see Payment Roles.
Configure Payment Profiles
The following section describes how to populate Payment Profiles fields through Zuora UI. You can also update fields through Zuora REST API. See Create or update payment profiles in bulk Zuora REST API for details.
Payment Profiles allow you to store payment information at a granular level, more than the Account level. This feature allows you to specify the payment attributes at the subscription level, which can be used to collect payments using electronic payment methods. This feature is applicable if a billing document has multiple subscriptions, and the payment collection should use different payment methods and gateways.
Once enabled, the payment method and payment gateway payment attributes will be visible in the Payment Operations section of the Subscription. To modify one or both attributes, click the pencil icon in the top right corner and select desired inputs from the drop-down menu.
- Payment Method: Should be an active payment method belonging to the invoice owner account, not the subscription owner. If that payment method is not available on the invoice owner account, the system ignores the subscription-level configuration and falls back to the account-level default.
- Payment Gateway: Should be an active gateway configured within the tenant. Ensure the gateway supports the selected payment method.
If a specific Payment Method or Gateway is not indicated on the Subscription, payment operations will use the account default payment method and gateway for processing.