Payment plan agreement: what to include
An agreement covers one booking, not every booking. Here is what each clause has to decide, and the three that are usually missing.
A policy is for everyone; an agreement is for one booking
Your deposit policy is written once and says the same thing to the next hundred customers. An invoice asks for an amount by a day. A payment plan agreement is narrower than either, and more useful: it names this customer, this booking, these amounts on these dates, and it records the moment somebody said yes to them. The policy is the rule. The agreement is the rule applied to one person, with the arithmetic already done.
That narrowness is the point. A policy cannot tell you whether this customer's third payment lands before or after the date they are booked for, and an invoice cannot tell you what was promised about the other three. The agreement is also the document that survives you being away: whoever covers your desk can read it and know what comes out next, from whose card, and what to do if it does not, without reconstructing any of it from your sent mail.
What the agreement has to decide
Every line below is a decision rather than a description, which is why the thin agreements are thin. It is quick to write down a total and a date. It takes longer to say what happens in the two or three weeks you are hoping not to have, and those are the only clauses anybody reads twice.
Both parties by name, and on your side who is allowed to agree a change to the schedule. Without that line, a change is whoever answered the phone.
What is being paid for, the date it happens, and the total as a single number with anything it excludes — taxes, delivery, extras added later. The schedule hangs off that date, not off the day the agreement was signed.
Each payment as an amount with its own calendar date, written out in full, including the one taken today. Monthly is a word, not a date.
That the card charged is the customer's own, that it is charged on those dates, and the name they will see on their statement.
What happens when a payment does not go through: how many attempts, how far apart, who they should speak to, and whether the later dates move.
The clauses nobody writes until the week they need them
Three keep going missing, and they are the three that cost an afternoon each. The first is a moved date. If the booking shifts by a month, does the schedule shift with it, do the paid amounts stay where they are, and does the price hold? Decide it in a sentence now and you are quoting a clause later instead of inventing a fair answer while somebody waits on the line.
The second is a handover: the customer who cannot come and offers a friend in their place. Say whether the booking can be transferred, who is responsible for the remaining payments if it is, and whose card the rest comes out of. The third is your own failure to deliver — you cancel, the venue floods, the trip does not run. A customer who has paid three of five instalments is owed an answer that was written before anybody was upset about it.
Agreed once, kept as it read
An agreement is a schedule somebody actually agreed to, so capture the agreeing: their typed name, the moment they did it, and a copy of the exact wording they were shown. Terms get tightened. If you keep only the current version you have lost the one this customer saw, and you will end up arguing about today's page over a booking made when it read differently. Store the text with the schedule, not instead of it.
Be plain about what the agreement does not do. Nobody is advancing money and no third party is involved: the payments come from your customer's own card to your own account on the dates in the list, and the obligation is between the two of you. The agreement also does not make the money arrive. A schedule nothing is automated against is a list of dates you will spend the season chasing, which is a different document with a worse ending.