How To Cut Over Your Operations

This document describes some important issues which you should keep in mind when switching your office over to using Collect! This includes entering debtor information and creating an account history in preparation of generating invoices.

This document is in addition to the setup routines described in the Setup Checklist. Please set up your system using the Setup Checklist before pursuing the activities described here.

View the Setup Checklist

Before you begin relying entirely on Collect! we strongly recommend that you run Collect! in parallel with your existing system and compare results. This is particularly important when generating month end invoices, since you will have an opportunity to detect and correct any errors in your administrative procedures.

Debtor Information

The cleanest start is to enter all your client and account information into Collect! Since this is often a daunting task, you may want to phase the change over a period of time. There are some important pieces of information which Collect! uses in its calculations and reports. These are described below. Please note that we can assist you to import your information into Collect! if it is currently in another software program.

Listed Date

The debtor's Listed Date is used by Collect! for various purposes. When you create new debtors and press F2 on the Listed Date, Collect! will display a calendar and you can select the date the debtor was originally listed with your office.

Financial

You will want to ensure that Collect! has the correct values for Original Principal and Interest, and current Amount Owing. You can achieve this by entering the original principal and interest values of the account when you received it. If the debtor has made any payments, you can enter these using the Finances button in the Debtor form. Use the Recalc button to recalculate the debtor's balance. Please note that the Payment Date is important for billing purposes and financial tracking.

Notes

Notes can be entered in free form.

Invoices

Invoices can be generated by Collect at the end of every month. During the calculation, Collect! analyses the payments and account adjustments which occurred during the last month. Collect also looks at the invoices from last month and the payments received from clients.

In order to ensure that generated invoices are correct:

1. Check that all transactions, commissions, taxes and client payments are entered for the month.

2. For any clients with outstanding balances for the last month, manually create an invoice with proper Total Owing, and 30/60/90 day outstanding amounts.

For NET Clients, open the Client and go into Invoices. Create a new invoice with the Date set to the first of the current month. Then, fill in the total of the outstanding amount as a NEGATIVE figure in the Total field.

For GROSS Clients, generate a statement for the Client for any date range. (To do this, you must have posted a least one transaction for one of this client's debtors.) Open this statement and edit it. Delete all the transactions from the invoice lines and delete all the entries in the fields, except for Client and Currency. Set the Date to the first of the current month. Fill in the outstanding amount as a POSITIVE value in the Total field.

If you have taken these steps, then Collect! will be able to generate invoices for next statement period.

Recalculating Your History

To update your complete financial history, you will need to recalculate all clients and all daysheets to account for transactions that you entered for historical dates.

Recalculate Clients And Daysheets

To recalculate all clients and daysheets, select Tools from the top menu bar and then select Recalculate from the drop-down choices. This will open the Recalculate Totals dialog.

RECALCULATE ALL DEBTOR TOTALS should be chosen with a mark.

Make sure RECALCULATE CLIENT TOTALS has a check mark beside it.

Also, make sure RECALCULATE DAYSHEET TOTALS has a check mark beside it.

Press START to recalculate all clients and daysheets.

There is a 730 days, or two years, maximum to go back, or forward, when recalculating. If you select a FROM value greater than two years, Collect! will limit results to two years backward scanning. If you select a TO value greater than two years, Collect! will limit results to two years forward scanning. This limit was imposed for performance and optimization.

See Also

- Moving To Collect!