2. Running persview and Selecting Criteria

You can find persview in the Personal Billing section of the Billing Functions window in Partner. You can also run it by typing persview at a command prompt.

When you first run persview, you are presented with a criteria screen:

Press [F1 -- Generate Report] to view a list of all accounts with personal balances. Skip to the next section, Working With Individual Accounts to learn how to use the report.

Before you press [F1], however, you can use the criteria options on the screen to limit which accounts will appear.

Criteria Options in persview

• Aged How

  You can choose how outstanding charges should be aged. Account totals appear in aging categories on the report, and they can be aged by transaction date (when the service occurred), by posting date (when the service was entered onto the system), or by payor date (the date the balance became the account's responsibility).

• Aged as of...

  Select a date to base the report on. Use the last "Nightly File" for a quick report, as the aging data is automatically prepared the previous night. Use the Existing File to quickly review the last report you manually aged. Or, ask persview to manually regenerate to a particular date. In most situations, you should stick with the Nightly File. If you have just finished entering dozens of payments, you may want to "Regenerate" the aging information for today.

• Personal Balance Range

  You may not want to work with an account unless they owe over ten dollars. If you only want to list accounts that have a certain balance, enter a dollar amount range in the fields provided.

• Name Range

  The Name Range question allows you to select a specific range of the alphabet. Enter the starting and ending letters of your alphabet range in place of the A and Z. Use this option if your office's billers divide their responsibilities by account last names.

• Which Accounts to Include

  By default, all of the categories shown are selected. If you wish to limit the accounts based on how long they have owed you money, you can remove or add X's in front of each category. The "Exclude by Account Flag" option can be useful if you don't wish to view certain account types.

• How to Sort the List

  You can sort the printed report or persview's interactive on-screen report in alphabetical order or by the total balance owed by the account. To indicate your selection, place an X in front of one of the two choices. You may find it useful to sort accounts by who owes you the most.

• Destination

  Finally, you must decide where to send the report output. To indicate your selection, just place an X in front of your choice.

  • If you specify the "Screen" as your destination, the results will appear on your computer screen in an interactive report. You will be able to scroll through the list and easily access information about the various accounts that are listed. It is also easy to generate a form letter or bill for some or all of the accounts. See below for more information.

  • If you send the output to your "Mailbox", you will receive an e-mail that you can review at a later time. You can also save the e-mail in a folder for archival purposes.

  • If you opt to print the report, it will be printed on your default Partner printer unless you enter the name of a different printer. Enter an asterisk (*) to view and select from a list of available printers.

  While printing or sending the list as an e-mail may be useful, you will find the interactive list (Screen) the most powerful choice. The remaining sections in this chapter explain how to take full advantage of the "Screen" option.

After making your criteria selections, press [F1 -- Generate Report] to run the report. persview may take a few minutes to gather the information about accounts with personal balances.