How To Post A Payment

When a Debtor makes a payment to your agency or to your client, we post a Payment transaction to the debtor's account. There are several ways to do this. The most direct way is from the Debtor form. The steps are covered in this document. We will post a check payment, as an example.

The steps are:

1. Open the Debtor form where you want to post the payment.

2. Create a Payment transaction and enter the details.

3. Examine the Debtor to make sure the new financials are correct.

The rest of this document walks you through these steps.

This assumes that you have already created transaction types that you want to use for your payments. Please refer to help topic, How to Setup Transaction Types, for details about creating Transaction Types or use the defaults that ship with the Demodb database.

Open The Debtor Form

1. Start Collect! and sign in as you would normally. Select Browse from the top menu bar and then select All Debtors from the drop-down choices. The list of all debtors will display.

2. Begin typing the name of the debtor you wish to post the payment to. As you type, Collect! will take you through the list and stop at the closest match.

3. Click on the debtor, or if the debtor is highlighted, just press ENTER or F5 to open the Debtor form. The debtor you selected should be displayed.

Create A Payment Transaction

1. Select the TRANSACTIONS tab to post the payment. If there are no transactions for this debtor, you will be prompted to enter a new one. Select YES to create a new transaction.

If the TRANSACTIONS tab is yellow, this quickly informs you that there are existing transactions posted to this debtor. When you select the TRANSACTIONS tab, you will see a list of all transactions posted to this debtor. Press F3. You should now have an empty Transaction form on your screen.

2. Press F2 to display the Transaction Type list.

3. To post a check payment, select Type 107, Check Payment Taken by Phone. If posting a credit card payment, select Type 109, Credit Card Payment. You may also have other payment types set up for your needs.

Once the type is selected, a lot of information is entered automatically. This information is taken from the settings for the Transaction Type that you chose.

4. Fill in the payment amount in the field labeled To Us, if the payment was made to the agency, or in the field labeled Direct, if the payment went directly to the client. The payment is entered as a POSITIVE amount. This reduces the debtor's Owing.

5. Fill in the other remaining fields as needed for your purposes. By default, Collect! uses today's date for the Payment and Posted Dates of the payment. Press F1 for details regarding these fields and the other settings that are available on the Transaction form.

6. Press F8 or OK to save the transaction. You will be returned to the Transaction list showing you the newly posted transaction.

If you are using Checks Taken by Phone, you may need to enter additional information into the DETAIL tab for the Debtor. Please refer to How To Take Checks Over the Phone for details.

Examine The Debtor

Inspect the money fields on the Debtor form to make sure the results are correct.

Summary

This topic introduced you to posting a payment in Collect!. There may be many different types of payments that you receive from your debtors. Each type may have its own settings in a separate payment Transaction Type set up for your purposes. Additional settings affect whether or not the payment is shown when you generate your month end statement for your client. Press F1 for details regarding the fields and settings that are available on the Transaction form.

See Also

- How To Setup Transaction Types
- Month End Process