How To Manage Finances

Financial Tracking

Accounting for credit and collections is a little different from normal accounting procedures. Legal requirements, commissions and trust accounting all affect the calculations and output requirements. Collect! handles each automatically, eliminating one of the most time-consuming aspects of an agency's Month End operations.

Accounting

Financial management includes tracking new accounts, posting payments and producing invoices and statements at month (or period) end. Support for trust accounting, payment histories, promises, NSF and post dated checks, interest calculations, fees, adjustments and judgements, and net or gross remit clients is provided. Comprehensive reports give you the accounting information you need on a daily, monthly and ad hoc basis.

Print your reports to the printer, the screen, a file or to a spread sheet where you might elect to perform complex and varying data manipulations.

Month end processing takes only minutes. Collect! automatically calculates and prints your statements, invoices, checks and summary and detailed reports based on the transactions posted during your last accounting period. You can choose the period the statements are to be generated for and create statements for all your clients or just select one or more clients and a date range. By default Collect! calculates on a monthly basis.

Please note, Collect! is not designed to manage your office accounting, only collections and credit accounts. There are so many accounting programs to choose from that we decided to not reinvent the wheel, but kept our prices low instead. Many of the reports produced by Collect! give necessary data to post into standard accounting packages. There is no need for account double entry when an offset balance will do. This is in accordance with accepted accounting principles. The tax man does require you to keep detailed records but not necessarily all in one location.

Interest

Collect! calculates simple and compound interest.

Compound interest is available for revolving accounts and Amortized loans using the Rule of 78s. Late fees are posted by Collect! when an account exceeds the grace period specified.

Commission Rates

Commission rates can be set for the client, each debtor, and on individual transactions posted in the system, giving you complete flexibility for billing and reporting. Commission Rate Plans and Collection Team Commission Tables allow you complete flexibility in billing and in-house commission and incentive programs.

Commission Rate Plans

Commission rate plans let you easily define sliding scales for account commissions.

Variable and fixed rate tables are available. Fixed rate plans let you define up to six commission rate ranges based on either the age of the account when listed, or the listed amount. Variable rate plans include a payment amount plan and a paid to date plan.

Collection Teams

Reports are available for each person working on Collect! to show their income and commissions earned.

You can assign teams of individuals to a single account and each individual in the team can be assigned a percentage of the agency's commission. Commissions can be assigned to individuals only as well. This information is reported in summary and detailed reports when you want it, the way you want it.

Note that teams can also be used in the Account Assignment batch functions to distribute new accounts evenly across groups of operators.

Multiple Currencies

Collect! supports multiple currencies including the Euro. Each account can have a different currency. You can set the currency on each debtor and their transactions. The financial amounts are displayed and printed with the currency symbol using standard Windows settings.

Collect! is the software of choice for multi-national agencies.

See Also

- Working With Collect!
- Introduction To Management Topics
- Month End Process
- Introduction To Printing Checks
- Financial Reports Basics - Introduction/Accessing