Introduction To Working A Debtor

Collect! can help you manage your debtor accounts any way you want to work them. If you can do it manually, then there will be some way to automate the process in this software. The high performance workhorse in this description is the Contact Plan feature which allows you to cascade a series of simple to very complex logic steps to automate inventory movement/management or data update/output.

Start by working your accounts individually, one step at a time. Then begin to automate the process stepwise, keeping careful watch on outcomes to ensure that your logic is leading to the desired result. As your steps being built in your Contact Plans are meeting with successful outcome, you can continue to build onto them until you have a Contact Plan that automates account movement through your company for an entire portfolio, cradle to grave.

There are some basic requirements for automating any process in Collect!. It is necessary to know each manual step exactly before you can automate the step.

Someone in your organization will be instrumental in automating Collect!.

This person:

• has to know how to use Collect! to work an account
• must take responsibility for your data
• has to know how the database is going to be affected if you select multiple records to work with one procedure

We recommend that all new automations be run in a test environment and thoroughly vetted before you take it live into your masterdb. The system ships with a demodb expressly to provide you with such a testing environment. There will be no redundancy in setup: any Contact Plan, Import/Export map, Report/Letter/Writeback report or Control File that you develop in your demo database can be easily exported or copied into your masterdb.

Collect! installs with many samples to show you how to start using advanced features and speed up your learning curve. Sample reports and contact plans can be used just as they are. You can also make modifications to adjust their actions to your requirements.

Any time you want to modify an item that shipped with the software, FIRST copy/paste the item in place to create a duplicate version. Rename one of them to be your modified version. This way, you do not lose your original copy in case you need to roll-back or keep the original version for other uses.

See Also

- How to Use the WIP List