City Payment Queue

The city payment queue is the internal tracking system for violations that have been paid by customers through Clear Plates but still need to be remitted to NYC. When a fleet operator pays a batch of violations, the money flows to Clear Plates via Stripe — but the actual payment to NYC (through CityPay or the OATH portal) is a separate step that must be coordinated.

Each item in the queue tracks: the violation details, the amount to be paid, the number of processing attempts, and the current status (pending, processing, paid, failed, or escalated). A daily cron job processes the queue, and items that fail after 5 attempts are escalated for manual intervention. Admin staff are alerted when items fail 3+ times.

For fleet operators, the city payment queue is transparent — after paying through Clear Plates, violation cards show a "City Payment" status indicating whether the payment has been submitted to NYC. Once confirmed, the violation updates to fully paid. Clear Plates processes the city payment queue daily at 3 PM UTC to ensure timely remittance of funds to the city.