Special Section: How Scheduled Payment Approval Work Differently
Last updated: June 16, 2026
Scheduled payments follow a fundamentally different timeline from immediate payments, and it's important your back-office team understands it so nobody is waiting on — or surprised by — an approval email.
The core difference: nothing reaches your back office until the scheduled date
When a customer creates a scheduled payment, it is not a real payment yet — it's an instruction to create one later. During this waiting period:
Your back office receives no notification at all. There is no "a payment is scheduled" email, no advance heads-up, and no daily digest on the partner side.
All the activity in this window is customer-side: their own approvers handle approving the schedule, and they receive the daily reminders (covered in the customer guide).
Your back office only enters the picture on the scheduled date itself.
What happens on the scheduled date
When the scheduled date arrives, a background process runs (within a configured processing window for each payment segment) and converts the schedule into a real payment. Only at that moment is the payment evaluated against your partner approval rules — using your thresholds as they stand that day, not as they were when the customer first scheduled it.
If that newly created payment meets the conditions for back-office review, that's when your team gets the standard or high-value "Approval Needed" email — exactly the same emails described above. Until then, there is nothing to act on.
In short: For an immediate payment, your approval email arrives within seconds of the customer submitting it. For a scheduled payment, your approval email arrives on the scheduled date, once the payment is actually created — never before.
The tight action window
Because the back-office email only fires on the scheduled date, your team's window to act is shorter and more time-sensitive than with immediate payments. Treat a back-office approval email for a payment that's due that same day as urgent.
When you'll never see a scheduled payment at all
A scheduled payment that required the customer's approval but was not approved by their side by end of day on the scheduled date is automatically cancelled — the real payment is never created. In that case your back office is never notified, because from your side the payment never existed.
Also note: even if the customer did not require their own approval on the schedule, your partner thresholds are still applied when the payment is created. So a scheduled payment can still land in your back-office approval queue on its scheduled date based on your rules alone.
Quick comparison
Immediate payment | Scheduled payment | |
|---|---|---|
Back-office approval email timing | Within seconds of submission | On the scheduled date, when the payment is created |
Advance notice to back office | N/A | None — nothing before the scheduled date |
Approval rules applied * | At submission | At execution, using thresholds in effect that day |
If customer doesn't approve in time | Stays pending | Auto-cancelled — back office never sees it |
Action window for back office | Standard SLA | Tighter — often due the same day |
*Elaboration: "Approval rules applied" — why timing matters
The single most important thing to understand about scheduled payments is when your approval rules are checked — because it is not when the customer schedules the payment.
Immediate payments — rules checked at submission
When a customer submits an immediate payment, PayRecs evaluates your back-office approval rules right then, against:
your approval thresholds as configured at that moment,
the payment's value converted to your home currency using that moment's FX rate, and
any first-payment or high-value rules in force at submission.
What you see is what was true the instant the customer hit submit. There's no gap between evaluation and execution.
Scheduled payments — rules checked at execution, not at scheduling
When a customer creates a scheduled payment, no approval evaluation happens for your side yet. The schedule simply sits and waits. Your approval rules are only applied on the scheduled date, at the moment the schedule is turned into a real payment.
That evaluation uses whatever is true on execution day, which may differ from the day the customer scheduled it:
Your thresholds at that time. If you raise or lower an approval threshold between the scheduling date and the execution date, the new threshold is the one that applies. A payment scheduled weeks ago is judged by today's rules, not the rules that existed when it was set up.
The FX-converted amount at that time. The payment's value in your home currency is recalculated using the execution-day rate. Because exchange rates move, the converted amount that gets compared against your threshold can be higher or lower than it would have been on the scheduling date — which can push a payment over (or under) an approval or high-value threshold.
First-payment / high-value logic as it stands that day.
Why this matters in practice
This leads to behavior that can look surprising if you're not expecting it:
A scheduled payment can require your approval on its execution date even though it wouldn't have when it was scheduled — for example, because FX movement pushed its home-currency value over your high-value threshold, or because you tightened a threshold in the meantime.
The reverse is also true: a payment that would have tripped a threshold weeks ago may sail through without review if your thresholds were raised before it executed.
Threshold changes you make are not retroactive to "locked in" scheduled payments — but they are not ignored either. They take effect for any scheduled payment that executes after the change. There is no snapshot of the rules taken at scheduling time.
Rule of thumb: Think of a scheduled payment as being "priced and checked" on its execution date, not on the date it was created. If you change approval thresholds, assume the change will affect every scheduled payment that hasn't executed yet.