Payment terms and installment simulation

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.
• Installments exist only on one-off charges paid by credit card. Subscriptions bill one amount per cycle — neither gateway splits a recurrence into installments.

Step by step

Set the account default

1. Go to Payments → Settings → Connections and edit the connection.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Save. Every new charge starts with that choice — and each charge can override it.

Apply terms to a charge

1. Open New charge and pick the payment method.
2. In the Gateway options block, fill in the late fee, interest and early-payment discount.
3. On the fee and the discount, choose between Percentage and Fixed amount. The field label follows: Late fee (%) or Late fee (Fixed amount).
4. 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

Leaving a field blank is not the same as entering zero: blank inherits the default configured in the gateway's own panel; zero overrides that default to no fee at all.

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. Installments exist only on credit-card, one-off charges.

See also

• Discounts and amount adjustments
• Create a charge and send it in the conversation
• Subscriptions and plans
• Connect a gateway