How To Cut-Over Your Operations

This document describes some important issues which you should keep in mind when switching your office over to using Collect! This includes entering debtor information and creating an account history in preparation of generating invoices.

This document is in addition to the setup routines described in the Setup Checklist. Please set up your system using the Setup Checklist before pursuing the activities described here.

View the Setup Checklist

We strongly recommend that for the first month after you cut-over to Collect! from another collection software system, that you run both systems in parallel with respect to financial transactions & remittance statements/checks. This will allow you to identify any setting adjustments you may need to make in Collect! that were missed in your initial Setup Checklist steps.

The cleanest start is to enter all your information into Collect! You can undertake to do this manually, OR, if you have access to your data in an electronic format, you may wish to contract our office to convert it for you and load it into your new software. This latter would provide you with a better than 80% turnkey system where all you'd need to do is verify the correct placement of the data and follow through with the Setup Checklist.

The following areas are of particular interest and need if you are manually entering your data or importing it in from another system:

Debtor And Client Information

When you are converting to a new system, it is a good time to clean house.

Are there accounts and clients of such an age and dormant/closed that you'll never need to access them? You may wish to backup such data for storage but not convert it to your new system. This is speaking to company history more than 15 years past.

At other times, less is NOT more. If it is a current client or debtor that has been active anytime in the last 7 years, 10-20 years if Judgment accounts, then on these there is no detail on your old files or system that you want to leave behind. Collect! has considerable numbers of user defined fields so that anything you have, we have somewhere to store it.

Listed Date

The debtor's Listed Date is used by Collect! for several purposes. If you are coming from a manual system, you must be sure to include the original Listed Date when you data enter your accounts. In an electronic conversion, this field would have existed in another system and will be mapped to the comparable field in Collect! if our office is doing your conversion,

Entering Pre-Conversion Financials

You will want to ensure that Collect! has the correct values for Original Principal and Interest, and all payments made since assignment so that the correct and current amount Owing will be reached when converted accounts are entered and recalculated. It is also necessary to identify the Interest Rate and Last Interest Date so Collect! has a date to take over charging interest from to keep your balances accurate.

If you are entering Payment Transactions as part of your conversion, the following fields are important:

1. Use the correct Transaction Type codes to reflect your pre-conversion payments. Complete Setup Checklist FIRST to ensure your Transaction Types have been reviewed and updated from default settings, if any depart from how you want your codes to function.

2. Payment Date - when you received it.

3. Posted Date - when you finalized it in your system. Most often
is the same as the Payment Date. This is a very important date in Collect!. It is the date that will make the payment eligible to be included on a client remittance. When Statements run, they are always looking at Posted Date UNLESS you set a company preference to indicate that your statements would use Payment Date only.

4. Input the Collector and Sales codes you want to have credit for the payment to build your past operations history.

5. Commission rate that was charged.

6. Any Taxes that were charged.

Notes

Notes can be entered in free form or converted electronically from your source file.

Invoices

Invoices can be generated by Collect! on whatever your client's remittance schedule requires. The most prevalent being Monthly. During a statement run, the system gathers all the debtor payments/directs, charges, fees, taxes, any payments the client made during the billing cycle towards any balance forwards and then computes what the clients' due amounts or amounts due you are as of the end of that billing cycle.

The Invoices tab on the client screen stores the Aged Balance Forward accounting and each time statements are generated, the clients' accounting history with your company is updated.

See Client Topics for more details on Remit types and running client Remittances.

You have 2 choices with a new installation.

1. Print out your Accounts Receivable from your old system before converting, then start your statements from the first month you are on Collect!. This will mean all the past history stays with the old system and only new billing cycles will be contained in Collect!. You will pursue any old balance forwards in your old system separately from Collect! and post them in your G/L account only, should clients pay old invoices in the early months you are on Collect!.

Or

2. After converting your old accounts with all transactions into Collect!, run statements for every billing cycle in that client's history to rebuild their A/R with your office. If all accounts and transactions making up that history were accounted for in you manual conversion, then the balance forward Collect! starts with should be exactly what was showing on your previous system.

Which way you choose is entirely up to you but may be predicated by the completeness of your pre-conversion data. If all the accounts and their transactions are not available to rebuild a client's A/R history, then you are better to go with option #1.

Recalculating Your History

To update your complete financial history, you will need to recalculate all clients and all daysheets to account for transactions that you entered for historical dates.

Recalculate Clients And Daysheets

To recalculate all clients and daysheets, your menu path is \Tools\Recalculate. This will open the Recalculate Totals window.

Check the following radio buttons with a dot to indicate you want these indicate type to be calculated:

Recalculate All Debtor Totals

Recalculate All Client Totals

Recalculate Daysheet Totals

Then click Start to initiate the process.

There is a 730 days, or two years, maximum to go back or forward when trying to recalculate history. This is a hardcoded ceiling that will disregard any From/To dates entered that exceed this limit and return results within the timeline cap.