Overview
A charge involves more decisions than just the amount. Payment terms gathers everything that changes what the customer pays and what your business receives:
- Late fee — charged once, when a charge passes its due date unpaid.
- Monthly interest — accrues while the charge stays overdue.
- Early-payment discount — a reduction if the customer pays before a given date.
- Installments and who pays the interest — the business absorbs the cost, or the customer pays it.
And the simulation answers, before you charge anyone, the two questions that matter: how much does the customer pay per month? and how much do you receive?
Prerequisites
- An active gateway connection under Payments → Settings.
- Terms depend on the gateway. Asaas accepts late fee, interest and early-payment discount; Mercado Pago exposes none of them, so those fields do not appear on a Mercado Pago connection.
- Card, boleto and Pix use distinct installment modes depending on the connection. Subscriptions bill an amount per cycle; capped recurrence has a final count.
Step by step
Set the account default
- Go to Payments → Settings → Connections and edit the connection.
- Under Installment interest, choose who pays:
- The business absorbs it — the customer pays the charge amount split into installments, and the gateway fee comes out of your net. This is the default.
- The customer pays it — interest is added to each installment so you receive the full amount.
- Choosing The customer pays it, set the monthly rate. Left blank, we use the gateway's own fee schedule — and the hint under the field shows what that comes to per month for the selected plan, before you decide to override it.
- Save. Every new charge starts with that choice — and each charge can override it.
Apply terms to a charge
- Open New charge and pick the payment method.
- In the Payment terms block, fill in the late fee, interest and early-payment discount.
- Choose Percentage or Fixed amount beside the fee and discount fields.
- For a credit card, choose the number of installments. The Simulation block appears below.
Read the simulation
The block shows two columns:
- The customer pays — for example
12x of R$ 83.08 (last one R$ 83.12)plus the total. The last installment carries the remainder; that is how the gateway divides the amount. - You receive — the net after the gateway fee, with the fee broken out underneath.
When the gateway confirms the simulation, a Confirmed by the gateway badge appears.
Settings & options
Charge plans and payment books
Native monthly installments are issued by the gateway. Capped recurrence has a final count but issues charges progressively: the projected schedule is not an issued boleto. A charge plan also differs from the reusable subscription template under Plans.
Under Payment terms, review connection defaults and override only what the charge needs. A blank field does not send an explicit override. Asaas account late-fee and interest settings cannot be read through its API; check the provider dashboard when needed.
| Term | Asaas | Mercado Pago |
|---|---|---|
| Late fee (% or fixed) | Yes | No |
| Monthly interest | Yes | No |
| Early-payment discount | Yes | No |
| All three on a subscription | Yes | No |
| Choosing who pays the installment interest | Yes | No — the business always absorbs it |
| Maximum card installments | 21 | 36 |
| Showing the net before payment | Yes | No |
Leaving a field blank does not send an explicit override. Check the connection default and gateway dashboard. Zero is an explicit value; confirm the gateway result before promising that a fee or interest will be waived.
Use cases
- Recurring service with frequent late payments: a 2% fee + 1% monthly interest on the subscription. Every charge the recurrence generates inherits the policy.
- High-ticket product: 12x with the customer pays the interest, so you receive the full amount.
- Incentive to pay early: a 5% discount up to 3 days before the due date.
- A fee in money: R$ 10.00 flat instead of a percentage, across charges of very different sizes.
Tips, limits & best practices
- A fixed fee or discount can never exceed the charge itself.
- A percentage never goes above 100.
- If you choose The customer pays it with no monthly rate and no gateway fee schedule available, the charge is refused with a message asking for the rate — rather than silently billing your business instead.
- Editing a pending charge sends the terms to the gateway too. Clearing every field removes the policy from the charge.
- The simulation is an estimate until the confirmation badge appears. When the gateway does not report the net (Mercado Pago), the screen says so — we never show an estimated number there.
Troubleshooting
"The simulation could not be calculated right now." A momentary gateway hiccup. Use Try again; the charge can still be created.
"This gateway does not report the net amount before payment." Expected on Mercado Pago. What the customer pays is still correct; the net is only known after settlement.
"We could not read this account's fee schedule from the gateway right now." Reading the schedule failed — a rejected credential, an outage, or an unexpected response from the gateway. Use Read the fees again right there: nothing is stored when a read fails, so the button really does query the gateway. Saving the connection again also forces a fresh read.
The fee and interest options do not appear. The connection is Mercado Pago, which does not offer those fields.
The installments field does not appear. Check the mode, method and limits offered by the connection.