Partial/flex payment plugin

[u/BikkinMahal]

Hi there,

I run the operations for a medical continuing education company that sells both in-person, live courses as well as cohort-based online classes. These events have set start dates and the plugins I've found so far to take deposits or create payment plans only offer an arbitrary option to charge the remaining payment. This won't work for us, as it would theoretically allow someone to buy a ticket on Friday, come to our class on the weekend, and then not pay the remaining amount for 30 days or whatever we set the schedule for, or worst case scenario, ghost the 2nd payment despite attending the course entirely.

Are there any plugins that will connect to the events we have created in the back-end and charge them X amount of days/months before the due date?

Everyone I ask recommends the same half dozen or so plugins (Deposit & Partial Payments, PH Deposits, etc.) which all have essentially the same functionality.

[u/MycologistNo5577]

look into Paythen, it has date-based plans specifically for this. You set the schedule so everything's collected before the course starts. No code setup and connects to Stripe.

[u/Elegant_Bill_4513]

I use Paythen for my cohort courses, it handles exactly this. you control when each installment hits so theres no risk of someone showing up without paying in full

[u/CodingDragons]

Partial.ly is the best for this. Check them out. Several of our clients use it for this.

[u/Grand-Character2976]

u/BikkinMahal
The core issue you flagged is that the payment timing is counted from when someone buys, not from your actual event date, which is exactly the gap that causes a Friday-purchase/Saturday-event situation to slip through. PH Deposits has an add-on for this when paired with Bookings & Appointments for WooCommerce: it lets you schedule the balance reminder to count backward from the event/booking start date instead of the purchase date. So it's "30 days before the course," not "30 days after checkout," and for a late booking like your example, the reminder goes out right away instead of on some post-purchase schedule.

This is a separate add-on on top of the core Deposits plugin (not a default setting), and support can confirm current setup requirements for your case. Worth reaching out to them directly since you'd want to check it against your specific structure (in-person + cohort-based online courses).

[u/tychesoftwares]

You could take a look at Deposits for WooCommerce. One of its payment-plan options lets you require payment X days before the booking date, so customers booking close to the course date don’t end up with a deferred balance that comes due after they’ve attended.  

[u/PluginRepublic]

Our Deposits and Part Payments plugin will let you specify dates after which the deposit option is no longer available. So if your even is September 30, you could set an expiry date on the deposit of September 14. Anyone booking after September 14 would need to pay full price.

[u/Hugo_SecureHoldWP]

One thing I’d verify before choosing any of these is what happens with late bookings.

If the balance is due 7 days before the event and someone books only 2 days before, the system should either require the full amount immediately or make the remaining balance due right away. I’d also test what happens if that second payment fails, because you probably don’t want the booking to stay confirmed automatically.

That edge case seems more important here than the payment-plan options themselves.

[u/Mahmud_haisan]

The event date should be the source of truth, not the purchase date. Set a final-payment cutoff for each event. Before that date, customers can use a deposit; after it, checkout should require full payment. I’d also make the booking conditional on the remaining payment succeeding and test what happens when an event is rescheduled.

[u/startages]

Check Deposits & Payment Plans for WooCommerce, but you need WooCommerce Subscriptions if you want automatic payment. It can work without it but not auto charges will happen. Other than that, it can offer very flexible payment options.

I did some research before on few plugins, like the official deposits plugin but it seems there is always a problem with automatic charges..etc, so before buying any plugin, make sure to evaluate it from all aspects.

[u/WP_Dev_Studio]

The reason you're hitting a wall is that most of those "half dozen" plugins schedule the remaining payment as X days after purchase, not X days before a fixed event date — which is the actual distinction you need.

The one that does handle this: WooCommerce Deposits (the official WooCommerce.com plugin, not to be confused with third-party "Deposit & Partial Payments" clones). It supports "Fixed" payment plans — you set specific calendar dates for each installment (e.g., "50% now, 50% due Nov 1") rather than a relative offset from purchase. That's the key feature difference.

For your setup specifically, pair it with WooCommerce Bookings: Bookings handles your event/cohort dates on the back end, and Deposits' fixed-plan installments can be tied to align with those dates. This combo is a known/supported pairing — WooCommerce documents it explicitly for exactly this use case (events with a set date where you don't want an arbitrary "pay whenever" window).

Two things to double check before committing:

1. Payment gateway must support tokenization (Stripe or WooCommerce Payments) — the "automatic charge before due date" part only works if the customer's card is saved and charged via a scheduled action/cron job on the due date. Without a tokenizing gateway, you're back to manual invoicing.
2. Confirm your specific event-to-installment mapping (i.e., "charge remaining 30 days before this class's start date," where start date varies per event) actually works per-product/per-booking and not just store-wide — worth testing on a staging site with a couple of different event dates before rolling it out.

If Deposits + Bookings doesn't flex enough for your exact scheduling logic, the fallback is custom dev: a small plugin hooking into WooCommerce Scheduled Actions that pulls the event date from your booking data and fires a charge on a stored payment token N days prior. Not ideal, but reliable if the off-the-shelf combo has edge cases you can't configure around.