Payment Schedules & Auto-Posting

A property sale rarely pays in one lump. It pays in stages: a booking deposit up front, instalments tied to construction milestones, a final payment at handover. REDA models that with payment plans — a reusable template of staged percentages — and turns each sale into a set of dated payment schedules, the actual instalments. This article shows you how to build a plan, what schedules REDA generates when a sale activates, how completing a milestone releases its due date, and the nightly run that posts due instalments to accounting — the one billing job that ships already scheduled. No prior REDA experience is assumed; every term is defined as we reach it.

The three-layer model

Four words name four different things here, and the article never blurs them. Getting the layers straight up front saves confusion later:

So a plan item is the template for a stage; a payment schedule is the instalment that stage produces on a real sale. Milestones sit alongside, gating the milestone-based items.

Building a plan

The plan header, and nothing more. The name and description are for humans; the percentages that actually drive billing live behind the Plan Items tab. Is Active is what decides whether it can be picked on a deal.

A payment plan itself is just a header — a description, and an active flag (only active plans are offered when you attach a plan to a property or sale). The substance is in its items:

REDA enforces the type-specific requirement. A Time Based item needs its offset, and a Milestone item needs its milestone:

Milestones

A payment plan milestone represents a point in construction — foundation complete, handover ready. It carries a property, planned start and completion dates, an actual completion date, and a Status that climbs a fixed ladder. That status is what releases the money:

REDA guards each rung of the ladder:

The payoff is automatic: when you set a milestone to Completed, every payment schedule linked to it gets its Due Date set to the milestone's completion date. That's how a milestone instalment goes from undated to due.

What happens when a sale activates

Schedules aren't created when you build the plan — they're created when a sale uses it. The moment a sale deal turns active and the property has a sale payment plan set, REDA generates one payment schedule per plan item, filling each in from the item:

• Amount = the item's percentage × the sale/purchase price ÷ 100.
• Due Date — for a Time Based item, the deal's under-contract date plus its Due After Days; for a Milestone item, blank until the milestone completes.
• Name, Charge Code, and any billing comments — copied straight from the item, along with links back to the plan, item, milestone, and property.

Two schedules sitting there with no due date isn't a bug — those are the milestone instalments, waiting for their milestones. Each schedule also carries an Is Due flag (true once its due date is set and has arrived) and an Is Posted flag, which is the gate the nightly run watches.

Auto-posting at 2:00 AM

Here's the part that runs itself. A scheduled run fires daily, finds every schedule that is due but not yet posted, and sets its Is Posted flag to true. A posted schedule is the signal the accounting extension consumes to raise its entries — so posting is the hand-off point from REDA into accounting (see The REDA Financials Bridge).

The payment schedule, field by field

Worked example: a 10 / 40 / 50 sale

A plan with three items: 10% booking (Time Based, 0 days), 40% foundation (Milestone), and 50% handover (Milestone). The sale is Harbour Villa 7 at a Sale/Purchase Price of 1,000,000.00, with an under-contract date of 1 July. Here's the timeline:

Notice the pattern: activation creates and dates only the time-based instalment; each milestone dates its own instalment when it completes; and the nightly run posts whatever has come due. The two undated schedules were never wrong — they were waiting.

A payment plan's three items: a 10% booking deposit billed on a time basis, then 40% and 50% instalments each tied to a construction milestone — mixed types that together add up to the full price.

The foundation milestone at In Progress, with planned start and completion dates set. When it flips to Completed, the schedule tied to it inherits that completion date as its due date.

A posted schedule: the nightly job has run, ticked Is Posted, and handed this instalment across to accounting — the point at which a planned schedule becomes a real receivable.

Where to go next

1. The Property Sale Lifecycle — how a sale activates and moves to closing.
2. Charge Codes — the billing categories your plan items reference.
3. The REDA Financials Bridge — what a posted schedule triggers on the accounting side.
4. How Billing Works in REDA — the wider billing model this fits into.
5. Scheduling Background Jobs — the billing runs that, unlike this one, need scheduling.

Frequently asked questions