How To Accrue Interest Periodically

Collect! automatically calculates interest according to your settings and keeps track of Total Interest and Accrued Interestin the Interest Detail settings. There may be times when you need to report the amount of interest accrued each month. This document shows how to grab the value of the interest accrued in a given month and post it to the account. This enables you to report the interest accrued each month on an account.

There are a few pieces to put in place to accomplish this:

• Accrued Compound Interest Transaction Type that is 100% of interest
• Post Interest contact plan that posts the above transaction and adjusts the Calculate Interest From Date
• Run Interest Plan contact plan that schedules the Post Interest plan to run each month

When these pieces are in place, Collect!'s Batch Processing feature is used to manage your accounts and process the transactions automatically.

Accrued Compound Interest

First we create an Interest Transaction Type with the settings shown below.

Accrued Compound Interest Transaction Type

Notice that "Percent of Interest" is selected and that the percentage is a NEGATIVE amount.

Also take note of the switches to turn ON.

When a transaction is posted, it will grab the accrued interest amount and post it to the account. Run on a monthly basis, this gives you a way to track the monthly accrued interest.

Post Interest Contact Plan

To make Collect! handle repeating events, we need to use contact plans and batch processing. So the Transaction is posted through a contact plan as shown below.

Enter a new contact plan in the system with the events as follows.

Post Interest Contact Plan

This plan has the following events:

Transaction 402 Event

And to change the Calculate Interest From Date for the account,

Edit Calculate Interest From Date Event

Now we want to run this plan on a monthly basis.

Run Interest Plan

To activate the automatic repeating feature, we need to put the Accrued Interest contact plan into a new plan with a Plan Event set to repeat monthly and we put in a Delay Days. This is necessary to put it into the automatic processing queue.

Run Interest Plan Contact Plan

This plan has only one event with the following settings:

RunPlan Event

Notice that this Plan Event is set to Repeat Monthly and that the Delay Days is set to 1.

Setting Up The Process

Try this out in your Demodb database!

Post the zz2 plan on a debtor. This will schedule the Post Interest Plan to run tomorrow. Tomorrow morning, use the Tools, Batch Processing, Process Automatic Contacts, Run Plans option. This will post the Transaction and set to plan to run again in a month.

This will result in a transaction posting the interest amount on the monthly basis on the account. You would use the batch processing utility each day to process any automatic plans that you scheduled this way.

The transaction will get posted and the plan will advance a month.

A report can then be designed to go through and pickup the accrued interest for the month and print it out any way you want.