How can we create memberships with two or more accumulated partial payments?

Question

We'd like to let individuals pay membership fees incrementally, e.g. four quarterly occurring payments of 0.25M (where M is the total membership fee). It looks like the devs sought to do something like this previously in the Civi core, and there may have been partial payment function deployed in 4.7 -- see this thread and this thread too. But I'm not seeing anything in our live install of 5.4.0 (running on WP 4.9.8) that supports creation of new membership once user has made two or more contributions of which the sum meets or exceeds the membership fee.

Am I missing something? And if not, is there any appetite for an extension or core enhancement that would enable both tracking of partial membership payments and creation of membership (or renewal of membership) once the membership fee is paid in full?

Answer 1

As of now, Partial payment is only possible through backend in CiviCRM. There is an open issue which extends it to be usable from live contribution page too. See https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/12319. To test/use this functionality, you need to perform the following steps -

• Apply this patch on your site.
• Create a pending/partially paid membership for a contact.
• Select Default invoice payment page from civicrm/admin/setting/preferences/contribute?reset=1.
• Navigate to user dashboard and you should be able to see a pay now link which points the user to complete this payment.
• The pending amount is prefilled on the contribution page and user is able to complete the payment using this live contribution page.

ToDo - On the last step, there needs to be a changeable amount field which user can use and pay the membership fee in different installments.