Payments category template

About

Payments covers everything on VA.gov that involves money moving in either direction: copay bills, overpayments, compensation received, and travel reimbursement. Because the page is about debt and payment, two of its rules differ from every other category page.

Read the Category pages overview first. This page covers only what Payments does differently.

Example

Select a numbered marker to jump to the guidance for that difference.

Differences from the Category template

No button beside the title

Requesting help with a debt and managing direct deposit are peers. Neither outranks the other, so no task gets promoted to a button beside the page title. Both sit in Quick access instead.

Overpayments never age out of Action required

An unresolved overpayment the Veteran can act on stays in Action required however long it has been outstanding. Aging a debt out of the list hides money the Veteran still owes.

Copays are not an exception, and they don’t need to be. A past-due copay bill rides the most recent monthly statement, so it re-surfaces inside the default 30-day window on its own.

Three more rules apply to this section:

• Only some overpayments belong here. An overpayment appears in Action required when its status is driven by a deadline, or when it asks the Veteran to call or submit a form. A purely informational status belongs in a record subsection instead.
• An overpayment already sent to the U.S. Treasury belongs in Updates, not here. The Veteran can’t pay it on VA.gov and has to contact the Treasury, so there’s nothing to act on from this page.
• Most items carry no tag. When one is needed, use the warning status, never error. Statement data lags reality, so the page isn’t in a position to state as fact that something is overdue. Warning says the item needs attention, which is true either way.
• A line of copy sits under the heading, before the items, explaining the lag. For example: “When you make a payment, our system may not update right away. Statements update monthly, so a copay bill or overpayment can stay on this list for several days after you’ve paid it.”

The tasks sit in Quick access

Payments carries Quick access rather than Get started. The 2 tasks Veterans come here to do — request help with a debt and manage direct deposit information — sit below Updates, so a Veteran sees what they owe and what they’ve been paid before they’re offered a task.

Travel pay reads per appointment

The overview says an item reads the same way on a category page as it does on My VA. Travel pay is the exception, and it’s a deliberate experiment.

My VA and My HealtheVet aggregate: “File travel pay for 3 recent appointments.” Payments names the appointment instead, so the team can compare a per-appointment row against an aggregate counter.

The row covers 2 situations, and they read the same apart from the tag:

• No claim started yet. The row carries no tag, because there’s no claim record to label.
• A claim saved but not finished. The row carries an informational tag reading “Saved” or “Incomplete,” matching the claim’s status.

Both carry the same title, which names the appointment’s date and time: “File for travel pay for your Aug. 12, 1:15 p.m. appointment.” Naming the appointment keeps each link unique for screen reader users when a Veteran has more than one to file. The facility and a “Submit by” line set 30 days out from the appointment read in the metadata.

Where the dollar amount goes

Every row on this page carries a dollar amount, so the rule from the overview matters more here than anywhere else. In Action required the amount leads the title, as in “$120.40 overpayment for Post-9/11 GI Bill.” In a record subsection it reads in the metadata line. It’s never pinned to the right side of the row.

An empty subsection depends on the debt

Most Veterans never have an overpayment. When a Veteran has none, the Overpayments subsection comes off the page entirely, along with its navigation entry and its subpage, rather than showing an empty state about a debt that was never theirs.

Everything else follows the template

The page description, category alert, Updates, record subsections, and Need help? sections all work as described in the Category pages overview.

Related

• Category pages — the shared template
• Authenticated home page
• Alert