3. Your Office's Billing Cycle: Sending Some Bills
Maybe your office prints current (or "normal") bills on the first of the month and overdue bills on the fifteenth. Maybe you print bills weekly based on the family's last name. Maybe you print bills weekly and have Partner automatically find every account with a balance that has not received a bill in 30 days. These are all different types of cycle billing.
You can control your billing cycle manually or automatically.
Manual Cycle Billing. You can manually control your billing cycle by changing the criteria options on the bills screen. Using the criteria options, you can limit: the age of bills to print, what zip codes will print, or what part of the alphabet will print. For example, perhaps you send "Normal" bills at the first of the month using the ebs program, and then you run bills the following week to print all overdue bills in-house. You could do this by changing the "Normal?" and "Overdue...?" questions on the bills and ebs screens.
Similarly, you can control your billing cycle manually by printing a certain zip code or alphabet range at different times during the month. Set all of these options when you press [F1 -- Make Changes] before preparing your bills.
Automatic Cycle Billing. The other way to control your billing cycle is to let Partner calculate which families should get a bill. Once you tell Partner how often an overdue account should receive a bill (28 days, for example), you can run your bills every day (or at any interval) and everyone who is due for a bill will receive one.
Activating an automatic billing cycle and running bills weekly (for example) can lead to faster and more efficient collections. Accounts will receive a bill within a week of their visit and they will never accidentally receive more than one bill within a cycle. An added advantage is that your billing workload and income from personal bills will be evenly divided throughout the month (or whatever your cycle length).
First, set how often you would like families with balances to receive a bill (every 28 days, for example). PCC can help set this up for you, or you can change it yourself in the Personal Billing section of the Configuration Editor (ced):
Once automatic cycle billing is turned on, run bills weekly (or at any interval shorter than the cycle) for all families and all ranges. Partner will check all outstanding balances and only generate a bill if the family has not received a bill for 28 days (or if they have new charges).