Debtor Notes

Collect! enables you to store unlimited information regarding your accounts in the Debtor Notes section. Notes are automatically date\time\status stamped with the ID of the operator you are signed in as. Settings for the Operator enable you to display note lines in different colors.

Debtor Notes

When you first view a debtor account, Collect! displays one screen of note lines. This allows you to quickly scan the most current notes, or the notes that you have flagged to be brought to the top of the notes. If you are using the notes color feature for your operators, you will also note that these preview notes are color coded according to the operator settings. This allows you to quickly determine who or what department made the last notes for this debtor, using not only by the date/time/status and operator ID stamp, but also color.

Whenever an operator clicks into the notes display, then Collect! displays contents that you can scroll through. Everything will remain the same except that you will not see the note lines in color.

Date/Time/Status And Operator ID Stamp

When a user selects the notes area, Collect! will automatically start the note line with the date, then time, then status code and finally the operator ID who is currently signed in. With access rights set correctly, users cannot modify or delete this time stamp. Any notes entered are started after the time stamp and then word wrapped accordingly as the user enters notes.

You may use Status Codes between 1 and 4 characters and Operator IDs that are between 1 and 6 characters without affecting the length of the Note Date/Time/Op ID stamp.

Notes made in quick succession, by contact plans for example, will sort correctly because the Time stamp records milliseconds.

Flagging A Note Line To Stay On The Top

Another feature available to users is the ability to bring any note line to the top of the notes. Typing an asterisk [*] in front of the date time stamp forces Collect! to bring the line to the top of the notes when viewing or editing.

Applying Color To Note Lines

This feature allows users to instantly see, by color, who has entered a particular note. By using the field labeled Notes Color on the Operator form, you can specify what color a note line will appear in when viewing the Notes field on the Debtor screen. You may set your accounting operators to shades of green, your collectors to shades of blue, and your management to shades of red, for example. Then, when you bring up a Debtor account, you could instantly identify, by the color, who has recently been making notes for the account.

Access Rights To Notes

Collect! has a unique feature with respect to Notes access. If you flag the Debtor Notes to be READ ONLY, Collect! will still allow any user to add notes, but they will not be able to modify or delete any previous note lines. Please refer to Help topic, Change Debtor Notes to Read Only for details.

Debtor's Notes may be accessed with the report writer. So you can design reports to print the notes or a specific number of note lines.

Date/Time Stamp Format

The dates in the Debtor and Client note time stamps will appear formatted using the date options specified in Collect!'s Date Format settings. This form is accessed through System-> Preferences- Options, Sounds and Colors, Select the DATE FORMAT button.

When notes are read from the database, Collect! will convert the original dates into the format Collect! has specified in the preferences. This is what will be displayed to the user.

When the notes are written back into the database, ALL the time stamp dates are converted into YYYYMMDD format without any separators.

There is one special case when reading old note dates, where Collect! cannot know what format a date is in. It is as follows. The date read from the notes is in MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY format and both the month and day are less than 13. Collect! cannot know which one is the month and which one is the day. The current date settings cannot be relied on because the user may have changed them.

To solve this, a new file is created in the bin folder called "dateformat.dat". It contains a format string representing the current date settings at the time it is created and represents the format of the dates in the existing notes. If the file exists, it is left alone. The user is free to change their date format settings in the preferences after this file is created.

When Collect! reads the notes and encounters an unconverted date in XX/XX/YYYY format where both the month and day are less than 13, it will use the data in 'dateformat.dat' to determine which fields represent the month and day. In all other cases, the month and day can be figured out easily.

When the notes are written back, all the dates are CONVERTED to the YYYYMMDD format.

This Date Format functionality is available in Collect! Version 11.6 Build 1.1 and newer.

See Also

- Debtor Basics
- Working A Debtor
- Debtor