6 best payment plan software tools for invoice-based businesses in 2026

The six best payment plan software tools in 2026 are Paidnice, Chaser, ezyCollect, Kolleno, Biller Genie and Alternative Payments, ranked on whether the tool splits an existing invoice into a schedule and collects it. Prices from $49.95 a month.

Paidnice suits a Xero or QuickBooks Online business that wants a deposit, installments and auto-pay written against the invoice it already raised. Chaser splits a single invoice weekly through to yearly. ezyCollect offers three plan shapes with direct debit behind them. Kolleno attaches collections automations to the schedule. Biller Genie lets the customer request a plan for the merchant to approve. Alternative Payments finances the plan and pays the invoice in full upfront.

Scheduling a plan and collecting a plan are different products

Splitting an invoice into installments and taking those installments are two separate jobs, and only some of these tools do both. Paidnice, ezyCollect and Kolleno hold a mandate and pull each installment on its date. Biller Genie relies on the customer's own autopay enrollment. Chaser writes the split and then carries on chasing the original due date.

The gap opens in month two. A schedule nobody pulls turns into a queue of manual follow-ups, and a schedule whose reminders still point at the original invoice date sends the wrong message to the one customer on the ledger who is doing what you asked.

Chaser is the clearest case, and worth understanding before you shortlist on grain. It splits a single invoice at any interval from weekly through to yearly, which is the finest published grain in this comparison. Its chasing then follows the original invoice due date rather than the installment dates, and its own documentation advises chasing the installments by hand. So a plan Chaser created is chased against a date that no longer applies, at a customer who agreed the plan and is keeping to it.

Which makes the first shortlist question narrower than it looks. Every tool below offers payment plans. What separates them is whether a mandate is stored, who pulls against it, and what the tool does on the morning a pull does not clear.

Who carries the risk once the plan starts

A payment plan is a credit decision wearing the clothes of a schedule. The moment you agree one, you have extended fresh terms to a customer who already missed the first set.

Five of the six tools here schedule your own receivable, so the money, the credit risk and the collection work all stay with you. Alternative Payments is the exception: it settles the invoice in full inside a day, charges your customer a fee of 3.0% to 7.0% by term, and absorbs the default itself.

That single choice sets everything downstream. Keep the risk and you need the tool to pull each installment and to tell you the moment one fails. Sell the risk and the term and the fee stop being yours to set, the customer pays a fee they did not pay before, and an underwriter you do not control will decline some of your accounts.

Six tools, and what each one does to the invoice

Read the plan grain row against the row below it. Grain on its own says only how the schedule can be shaped; the pairing says whether the plan runs itself or becomes a recurring diary entry.

"Not verified" means the installment behavior could not be confirmed from the vendor's public materials. "Not published" means the vendor prints no figure. "None found" means no evidence either way, so no plan mechanic is documented in either direction. Prices are the vendor's published or last-verified from-price on the date shown, in the currency the vendor prints, without conversion.

What happens when installment 3 fails

Every vendor documents how a plan is created. Almost none documents what happens on the morning an installment does not clear, which is the only part of the mechanism a controller ever has to handle personally.

Four of the retry cells read Not published, and that is the finding rather than a gap in the research.

The failure path is the least documented part of every payment plan product in this category, which makes it a demo question rather than a comparison row. Ask the vendor to fail an installment in front of you, and watch three things: what the ledger shows, what the customer receives, and what reaches the controller.

Two behaviors are documented well enough to decide on now. Chaser will not raise a fee on a payment-plan or partially paid invoice at all, so starting a plan switches the fee engine off for that invoice and nothing accrues behind a plan that collapses. Paidnice keeps the fee policy under the customer group, so an account moved onto a plan can be moved to a group with a softer rule while the rest of the ledger stays on the original one, and moved back if the plan fails.

What the plan does to your ledger

Three shapes exist, and they do different things to your aged receivables report and to your tax point. No vendor demo raises this. Your accountant will, usually after the first plan has gone out.

• One invoice, split. The original stays on the ledger at its original date and value, and the installments are collections against it. Aged receivables keeps showing the full balance in its original bucket until each payment lands. Nothing moves on the tax point, because nothing about the invoice changed. This is what Paidnice writes against the Xero or QuickBooks Online invoice, and what Chaser and Kolleno describe when they split one.
• New invoices, one per installment. The original is credited or voided and replaced by several smaller documents with their own dates. The aged report looks healthier the same afternoon, which is both the attraction and the trap, and each new document carries its own tax point.
• Credit note and re-raise. The original is credited in full and a fresh document issued. This is the version that most often goes wrong at reconciliation, because the credit and the re-raise can land in different periods.

Settle the tax point before you start offering plans rather than afterwards. In a VAT jurisdiction the time of supply is generally fixed by the original invoice, so splitting the collection does not move VAT you have already declared; replacing that invoice with new ones can move it, and a credit note certainly does. Under US sales tax the equivalent question is when the liability accrued and whether your state treats an installment arrangement as a change to the sale. Neither answer belongs to a software vendor.

Which ledgers carry a plan

• Xero. All six connect. Paidnice writes the plan against the Xero invoice itself, and Chaser and Kolleno split an existing one on the same ledger.
• QuickBooks Online. All six connect. Paidnice, Chaser and Kolleno build the schedule for you; Biller Genie waits for the customer to ask for one.
• QuickBooks Desktop. Biller Genie through its separate connector, and Alternative Payments. Nothing else here reaches it.
• MYOB. ezyCollect natively across AccountRight, Exo, Essentials and Acumatica. Paidnice reaches MYOB on its Custom plan only, as a build.
• NetSuite, SAP and Sage Intacct. Kolleno and ezyCollect, with Chaser and Alternative Payments connecting to most of the list.

Deposits, first payments and mandates

The first payment predicts the rest. A plan that opens with a deposit taken against a stored mandate behaves nothing like one that opens with a link and a promise.

Only Paidnice documents a deposit or down payment on a plan. Kolleno explicitly offers none, ezyCollect's deposit handling could not be verified, and Chaser and Biller Genie show no evidence either way. Alternative Payments has no deposit because there is nothing to deposit against: the invoice is already settled in full.

Behind the deposit sits the mandate, and the rails decide what a mandate can be. Paidnice collects through Stripe or Pinch Payments. ezyCollect's Auto-Collect is a direct debit, which in Australia and New Zealand is the strongest instrument on this list, because the pull is initiated by you rather than re-authorised by the customer each time. Kolleno runs Stripe, Blink, Adyen and GoCardless. Biller Genie runs more than 20 US gateways and enrols the customer in autopay with per-customer thresholds. Alternative Payments offers US ACH free to the payer, plus PAD and EFT in Canada.

Where no mandate can be stored, a plan is a series of requests, and the response rate on request four is not the response rate on request one.

How the plan and the late fee interact

Three of the six can charge for late payment at all, and what each does once a plan exists is the thing to check before you offer one. Paidnice runs fee and interest policies per customer group. Biller Genie charges a flat late fee from 30 days past due through an add-on. Chaser runs one global rule that explicitly stands down on a payment-plan invoice. ezyCollect, Kolleno and Alternative Payments document none.

This matters more here than the row in the table suggests. A plan is a concession, and a concession is only worth something where the alternative costs the customer money. Where the tool has no fee engine, the plan is the only lever on the desk and there is nothing to trade it against.

The three positions available, and what each one leaves you holding:

A fee that varies by group

Paidnice raises two charge types on the same customer group, an invoice late fee and a statement interest charge, both posted to the ledger as Draft or Approved. Because policies sit under groups, a customer on a plan can be moved to a group whose rule is softer without switching the policy off for everyone else

A flat fee with a fixed trigger

Biller Genie treats an invoice as late at 30 days past due, then recurs the charge on a 30-day schedule into a finance charge account. There is no interest calculation and nothing varies by customer

A rule that stands down on a plan

Chaser has four calculation types recalculated daily, but only one global rule, and no fee is raised on a payment-plan or partially paid invoice. Starting a plan turns the fee engine off for that invoice

Where the fee posts to the ledger it enters the customer's accounts payable system, their aged payables and their payment run, which is what makes it something you can waive deliberately, in writing, in exchange for the first installment clearing today.

What we ranked on, in order

The order below is applied identically to every tool, and the first three criteria are about the mechanism rather than the marketing.

1. Segment fit. Does the tool serve invoice-based small and mid-sized businesses, at a price that size of business can sign off?
2. Plan grain. Can it split an invoice that already exists, and how finely: weekly, monthly, a fixed count, a fixed amount, or a deposit plus the balance?
3. Who collects the schedule. Does the tool pull each installment from a stored mandate on the date it falls due, and does the chasing follow the installment date or the original invoice date?
4. A price printed somewhere public, in the currency the vendor uses, with the month it was checked.
5. A rating, its platform and its count, all three on the page. Two scores inside 0.1 of each other are settled by whichever has the deeper verified base behind it.

Where a mechanic could not be confirmed for every tool it is printed inside the entry that documents it rather than used to order the list. ezyCollect's deposit handling and Chaser's auto-pay behavior are both unverified, so neither moved a position.

Plans, buy now pay later and the pure-play tools

Payment plan software splits an invoice you have already raised and collects it. Buy now, pay later means a third party settles that invoice and carries the default. A third group sells plans that never touch a ledger at all.

Consumer-facing services such as Square through Afterpay and PayPal Pay Later are the financing shape aimed at retail checkouts. Alternative Payments is the same shape sold into B2B invoices.

Then there are the pure-play plan and deposit tools that sit outside accounting software entirely: Partial.ly, Paythen, PaySimple and Stripe Billing, with GoCardless as the direct debit specialist and Denefits selling financed, no-credit-check plans into healthcare and services. None of those writes the plan against a ledger invoice, so a business whose receivables live in Xero, QuickBooks Online or an ERP reconciles two systems by hand. That is the trade for the flexibility they offer, and for some businesses it is worth making.

The five things to look for when you shortlist:

• The plan sits on the existing invoice: the receivable keeps its original date, tax treatment and aged position, rather than being voided and reissued as several small documents.
• A deposit and a schedule: an upfront amount followed by equal or custom installments, at an interval the customer can actually service.
• Auto-pay behind the schedule: a stored mandate that pulls each installment on its date, so nobody sends a link twelve times.
• Chasing keyed to the installment: a reminder about the installment that was missed, not about the original invoice due date.
• Cash application that survives partial payments: receipts matched back to the invoice and the ledger with no spreadsheet in the middle.

A last practical point: the plan has to survive contact with your cash application. Part payments against one invoice, credit-note offsets and bank files are where a plan quietly becomes a reconciliation job, which is why Kolleno's depth there is worth more on this page than its feature list suggests.

What payment plan software costs in 2026

Entry prices verified in August 2026: Biller Genie $49.95 a month plus 0.50% of invoices collected, Paidnice $69, Alternative Payments $199, ezyCollect A$275 on an annual contract, Chaser £199, Kolleno $650 per user.

Read the meter, not the headline. Biller Genie and Alternative Payments charge against the money that moves, so the bill grows with revenue whether or not the tool is doing more work. Kolleno charges per user, so a credit control desk of three multiplies the bill. Chaser charges by company turnover, so the price steps as the business grows rather than as the plan book grows.

Paidnice charges by invoice volume on a flat tier with no per-seat fee above Essentials. ezyCollect is the only one here with a setup fee, at A$900 on the entry tier, and its monthly billing option adds 20% over the annual price.

Two costs sit outside the subscription on all six. Payment processing is charged separately everywhere, and it is the fee the plan actually runs on, so a twelve-installment plan pays twelve transaction fees where a single settlement would have paid one. Add-ons are the second: payment plans themselves are an add-on at Biller Genie, ACH is an add-on there too, and multi-entity is a per-entity add-on at Paidnice.

What that means at your size

• Under $1m. Biller Genie at $49.95 a month plus 0.50% while the volume keeps the percentage small, or Paidnice at $69 to hold the plan and the fee policy on the same customer group.
• $1m to $4m. Paidnice or ezyCollect. ezyCollect's entry tier covers 200 debtors and pairs the plan with direct debit collection, at A$275 a month on an annual contract.
• $4m to $20m. The genuine head-to-head. Paidnice for a plan written on the ledger invoice with a fee policy behind it, Chaser for the finest installment grain and the deepest ledger list, at £199 on Compact and £599 on Core.
• Above $20m. Kolleno, where the plan is attached to automations and cash application absorbs the partial payments it generates. Chaser's Complete tier where staying on one system matters more.

Payment plan questions

What finance teams ask between the shortlist and the first plan going out: what the product actually is, what it costs, and what happens to a late fee once an invoice is on a schedule.

Sources, method and publisher

Accounting.Events publishes this comparison. No vendor pays to be in it, and no vendor pays for a position in it.

Plan mechanics come from vendor help centers and product documentation rather than from marketing pages, because the difference between scheduling an installment and collecting one is almost never stated on a pricing page.

Prices are quoted in the currency each vendor prints, with no conversion applied, and every entry-cost line carries the month it was checked.

Ratings carry the platform and the review count, so an 11-review base and a 374-review base are visibly different weights of evidence.

Where the documentation is silent, the cell says so, and where a mechanic could not be confirmed it is marked rather than guessed. All of it was re-read in August 2026 and is re-read on every update.

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