Auto payments - do they work for anybody?

I can't get auto payments to be useful.  I'll put the buggy interface to one side for now, I've got a ticket with tech at Hostaway to try and fix something, but generally I'm having trouble using auto-payments at all.

At first I set up 100% payment at booking creation.  So, an example: I get a call, a new guest makes a direct booking, and I enter their reservation info, advising them that a portal will get generated allowing them to enter card details.  However, our 'clever' system tries to charge the payment as soon as the booking is created, which in 99% of the cases is before the guest has had time to enter their card - so it fails, and needs to be mopped up.

Then I made it so that it takes 100% payment 1 hour after creation.  A bit better, but now guests are confused why the payment isn't taken when they enter their card details - or it does a zero value transaction, and then takes payment later - all without any advice to the guest about what will happen.  Or the guest still hasn't entered their details in that 1 hour window.  Or it's a last-minute booking and the 1-hour payment would be after the guest has potentially checked in.

I then had a US VRBO guest who questioned why we took 100% payment up front, as this nearly put him off booking.  So I thought I'd try the staged payment option.  Works well for far-out bookings, but goes completely bananas for a near one, taking multiple payments at the same time.

Then there's this whole concept of having templates, which I thought would be great, because I could offer guests different payment plans for their stay.  A far-out or long stay could have staged payments, while a near one could be 100%.  But no - the templates are all but useless as you can only allocate one to each listing.  Although (previous mention of buggy interface) you can actually allocate more than one, and it applies both/all and so the guest gets charged multiple times.  Not great.

Maybe I'm doing something completely wrong and somebody can correct me, but I'm struggling to make it work effectively and if anything it makes us look a bit amateurish, and when dealing with people's money and payments, this is not a great look. 

To make the system work properly I think it needs a few improvements:

I really feel their needs to be some information provided to the guest when they book and particularly when they go through the payment process and enter their card, about when and how payments will be taken.  We currently don't have the ability to add any text to this part of the guest portal.

Creating a charge trigger based on the card details being entered, not on the creation of the listing.  This would then charge at the correct time.

Given the concept of templates - provide the option to offer the different schedules to guests.  Or even better, provide different schedules based on rules.  Oh, and fix the bug that allows us to overlap more than one schedule.

I'm honestly hoping somebody can tell me I'm being stupid and using it wrong, but it seems to me to be unusable.

Tom