Our ordinances are written to have all payments applied to penalties and interest first, and then principal. Currently, there isn't an option to apply payments in Product and Billing Item order - only oldest or newest charges. We would like the option to apply to Finance Charges first, then any remaining charges.
Unfortunately the functionality does not exist in AR to create application rules like you are describing...to automatically apply payments against certain charge items first. The work around is to change your business rules to manually apply payments. In this case you would record the payment and then manually apply it to open/unpaid charges that would be listed. This would allow you to apply the payment against your unpaid penalties/interest first.