Who owns the payment schedule in a small events team
In a team of four the schedule belongs to whoever answered the enquiry. Here is how to split the job on purpose instead.
The job nobody is given
In a small team the payment schedule belongs to whoever opened the enquiry. That is not a decision anybody made; it is what happens when the person who sold the booking is also the person the customer replies to. It holds until that person is on a site visit, on leave, or has moved on, and the second payment is the one nobody is watching.
The tell is a question like "did the balance come in on the March booking?" asked out loud across an office rather than answered by looking at something. If the answer lives in one person's memory and mailbox, the schedule has an owner, but not one you chose and not one who can hand it over.
Small teams do not need a department for this. They need the job named, and the name written somewhere a colleague can find on a quiet Tuesday morning without having to ask.
It is really three jobs
The first is setting the schedule: how much is due today, how many payments follow, and how far before the date the last one lands. That is a commercial decision and it sits with whoever is allowed to move a date or agree a smaller deposit, which is usually the person who signs the booking off rather than the person who types it in.
The second is watching it. Once plans are live somebody should see the same picture every week: what is due, what cleared, what failed. This is the job that gets dropped, because nothing about it is urgent until the week it is.
The third is the conversation. When a payment does not go through, somebody has to be comfortable writing to a customer about money without apologising for the schedule they agreed to. That is a different temperament from the one that sells a date, and it is perfectly reasonable for it to be a different person.
Where each one should sit
Setting belongs to the owner or the manager. The shape of a plan is the part a customer cannot quietly change later, so it should be set by the person who can say yes or no to an unusual first payment.
Watching belongs to whoever already has a standing weekly habit — the one who reconciles the bank, sends the rota, or prints the run sheets. Attach the check to a routine that already exists instead of inventing one that has to be remembered.
Talking belongs to the person the customer already knows, if there is one, and to a named role if there is not. Either way the message should come from an address that reaches a human on reply. A customer whose card expired will answer a person and ignore a no-reply.
Writing it down so it survives a handover
One page is enough. Who may set a schedule and what they are allowed to change. Who looks at the live plans, and on which day. Who writes to a customer when a payment fails, and what that first message says. Where the signed agreement for each booking is kept.
Keep it to the things a new coordinator would otherwise have to ask about, and keep it next to the booking process rather than in a policy folder. A line in the shared calendar entry for the weekly check is worth more than a document nobody opens.
The reason to name an owner is not control. It is that a plan with dates on it outlasts whoever took the booking, and the customer who agreed to those dates should never be the first person to notice that nobody has been watching them.