Create Delinquent Fees

Introduction

The purpose of this process is to allow creation of delinquent charges for any unit account past due. This process will assess delinquent amounts on an invoice-by-invoice basis for each unit. Since the property management industry usually assesses late fees on unpaid invoices, or on specific invoices, the late fee process is handled differently than most late fees in different industries.

There are two different types of late charges able to be assessed, depending on the value in the 'Type' field, within Delinquency Info section of the Client Maintenance form: 0 - flat fee or 1 - % fee assessed outstanding balance. Note: a value of '0' assesses a flat dollar amount while a value of '1' assesses a % of the outstanding balance. A blank value assesses NO late charge.

In order to calculate late fees, each T/R invoice is assigned a due date. Except for auto invoicing, this duedate completely depends on the billing notice assigned in the Client Maintenance field: 0 - No notice, 1 - statements, or 2 - coupons. Auto invoicing always creates invoices with a due date of the beginning of the billing cycle.

Except as noted previously, invoices for non-statementing clients will be assigned a due date of the current date when created. Invoices for any client with a statementing billing notice type will be assigned a due date of the beginning of the next billing cycle. Therefore, changes to billing notice types can cause problems with delinquency calculations.

The basic rules for late fee creation are as follows:

  1. The possible late charge types are:
    • if late.type = 1 => primary charges only !
    • if late.type = 2 => everything except: late fees, deposits, and legal judgements
  2. Clients do not create late charges if:
    • 1) No late charge type exists
    • 2) Late charge amount/percent is zero (0)
  3. If the current T/R financial period is not the last month of the client's billing cycle then:
    • 1) A system administrator (level >= 7) will be queried if they want to create late charges anyway
    • 2) If user is not a system administrator, late charges won't be created.
  4. Customers not eligible for late fees are:
    • 'Z2' type customers (non-bill/inv customers)
    • 'Z3' type customers (non-bill/latefee customers)
    • 'Y' type customers (no late fee customers)
    • customers who have moved-in since the last inv date if the client uses a "statement" as a billing notice type
    • vacant units in an apartment-type client (chart = A, O, T)
    • invoice(s) balance less than or equal to late charge
  5. The following types of charges will NOT have any delinquent fee assessed:
    • DELINQUENT FEE
    • DELINQUENT CHARGE
    • LATE FEE
    • LATE CHARGE
    • DEPOSIT
    • JUDGEMENT
    • Any invoice with a Delinquent Fee Critical G/L Acct# in it

In order to calculate late fees, it is important to figure out what the outstanding balance is for each customer. This is the important question whose answer is the basis for understanding the delinquent process, therefore always CLEAN-UP Customer accounts before running this process.

The main issue is to know which invoices are subject to late fees and what date these invoices become delinquent and, therefore, subject to a late charge.

There are several pieces of information we need in order to answer the above question:

  1. When was the last time the client had a statement sent out? What was the statements due date? Although we do not know the statement date we load the last statement due date in the client file after each statement run. This gives a base due date to operate from.
  2. When was an invoice first billed? Each invoice in the T/R module has the due date calculated (current date or next-billing-cycle date) and loaded into the Ledger file at the same time the invoice is created. This info is only loaded once during the life of the invoice! This data allows the system to track the ageing spread of every invoice on the system. The exception to this rule is when a customer has a "Z" customer type. A "Z" customer type prevents any billing from occuring during the monthly statement run. All invoices created with a customer type starting with "Z" will have the date billed (not the due date) equal to the date the invoice was posted to the system. This prevents items from appearing on any Monthly Statement.
  3. What date does an invoice need its next late fee calculated from? This information must be kept in the invoice file itself since we calculate late fees based upon invoice balances not customer balances. When an invoice is created, this data is left blank. When the late fee program is run this data is used to determine when the delinquency date should be calculated from. When a delinquent fee is assessed, the new date (the delinquent date) is added to the list of dates. This way any delinquent calculation will calculate absolutely from the last date an invoice had the delinquency program run. If, however, a delinquent run was skipped then running the delinquency program will not make up for the skipped delinquency run. Delinquency fees are only calculated from the date the invoice was last due until the delinquent date of the delinquency run. This insures each invoice has a record of when the delinquent date should be calculated from and when the invoice was last billed (due) to each customer. This field of data could have multiple values if several statements are sent out before invoices become delinquent (i.e. 30 day delinquent dates or 45 day or 90 day, etc). The data changes during the End-of-Month updating only occurs at the end of the billing cycle (mthly, qtrly, etc).
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