Debtor Financials Basics

There are several fields on the Debtor screen that display financial values for the account. Principal and Judgement, initial interest and terms are handled through the Financial Detail window. Fees and charges can also be addressed through this screen.

Any transaction entered with a financial type " Payment" will be totalled and displayed in the Paid field. All other transaction types that are not designated specifically as "Payment" are itemized in the Transaction Tab and can be viewed all together or by each transaction type, i.e. to see only Adjustments, you'd click into the Adjustment figure bucket in the balance breakdown, likewise for Fees, Legal Fees, Misc, and Other Charges.

Only those Financial Type "Payment" transactions are denoted in Collect! as Paid amounts in reports. If you elect to apply debit amounts to Financial Types "Fee, Legal, Other, or Misc", you will need to have payment based reports customized to include these amounts.

However, if you use Financial Type "Payment" and also " Payment Breakdown", you can effectuate amounts being applied to the fields of interest while still maintaining a type of transaction that will be recognized by the system as a Paid amount. See the Help topic "Transaction Type".

The Owing field is populated only with the balance due to the Creditor as at the current date. It is a sum total of the entire column from Principal +/- Interest and the various charges/fees until the final tally for the Owing amount.

If you click into the Owing field itself, you will get a popup of the Debtor Financial Summary screen which summarizes everything that is applied to the account as an amount owed, everything applied as a payment and into what figure bucket those proceeds were applied to, and it arrives at the final balance owing. This screen is useful if the collector is speaking to a debtor who is asking for an accounting recap that doesn't require line transactions with specific dates/amounts (which is available in the Paid breakdown tab or within the Transaction Tab itself.

The main Transaction Tab carries all the line item details of the financial events as they occurred. In addition to how the total figure posted affects the balance owed, there is a Payment Date and a Posted Date. These two dates may be the same or they may differ. If the differ, then the date your company received the money and posted it the system were not the same.

WARNING: Do not ever back-date a payment into a previous, closed Statement month. These amounts have no way of being reported to your client as you will not be running statements for that period again. Best would be to use the 1st of the month immediately after the month you wanted to post into, with an extra Description addendum as to payment/posted date you mean it to pertain to.

Each transaction line item also contains how much commission was applied and which collector code it was attributed to. If you track inside sales codes, this too is stored in the transaction. Each transaction also stores any taxes which may be applicable. From the transaction entries, all the financial metrics in the system are generated and client remittances are made.

Collect! ships with an extensive series of Transaction Types. You need to be aware that the payment hierarchy that is default at time of shipping is Fees, Interest, Principal, Legal, Misc, Other. If you wish to have your payments disbursed in any other order of operations, like Principal, Interest, Fees, Legal, Misc, Other, then you need to make these changes to your Transaction Type setups that you intend to use PRIOR to posting your first payment.

Even if you are not using "Payment Breakdown", the defaults set for the order of operations that payments will be applied to the various figure buckets is still being adhered to by the system. If your preference is other than the shipping default order of operations, you need to update each Payment Breakdown "Payment Order" for each transaction type before commencing usage.

Accessing Debtor Financials

All areas regarding setup of a debtor account financial information are manually entered at the time you input your new accounts and post transactions subsequent to listing, OR imported directly into the appropriate fields with a predefined import map.

Once these initial values are set, the next stage is to post transactions for payments, adjustments or additional fees and charges. These are done through the Transactions Tab on the Debtor screen.

Commissions are generally set at the Client level. You will see the current rate in the Debtor's Rate field.

To register Judgement information, access the Financial Detail screen by clicking into the Principal field. You will be presented with additional fields that can be filled. You initialize the entry of Judgement information by entering a Judgement Date. This date immediately becomes Read Only so that as a legal court order, the information cannot be readily modified by just anybody. To complete the entry of this Judgement, fill in the Judgement Principal and Judgement Interest amount as applicable. Complete the Interest fields by selecting Simple, then following the prompts if your Judgement Order has awarded either contractual or statutory interest as part of the Order.

The only figure Collect! will calculate Judgement Interest on is the figure you enter into the Judgement Principal field. If your Judgement total is comprised of the Principal/interest/ costs awarded and post-Judgement interest is to be charged on the entire awarded amount, then enter the whole Judgement balance amount into the Judgement Principal field. Otherwise, your Interest awarded at time of Judgement and costs will not be included when the system is calculating post-Judgement interest.

Payments, and adjustments are handled strictly through the posting of appropriate transaction types. You can post or view transactions by selecting the Transactions tab on the Debtor screen, and then pressing F3 or the NEW button to raise a new entry input screen.

See Also

- Financial Settings
- Transaction Type
- Judgement Information