Introduction

The Advantos Enterprise Tenants Receivable (TR) System lets you easily process charges (invoices), credits, payments, deposits, and reversals to resident accounts. It also streamlines printing monthly statements and monitoring the collection of receivables. It is the workhorse of the software, with many features designed to help you accomplish this task. All transactions posted in this module instantly hit general ledger. The key features are outlined below.

Customer Account Maintenance

This section of the TR system is the main process used to maintain Resident Data. A data record can be built for each customer, or unit, maintaining critical information on the customer and helping to generate a receivable to your property client from the resident. The data record maintained on the resident contains statement mailing addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and information on fixed charges, as well as a breakdown on all the transactions processed on the customer account. Special move-in/move-out utilities have also been included that automatically calculate prorates on apartment type units and aid in the correct transfer of information from an old to a new resident.

Bank Deposits

The Tenants Receivable module lets you efficiently manage your clients' funds. It is designed for a high-volume, batch-processed depositing environment. You can post checks to units and create a history record, but hold the posted items until enough items are collected to warrant a bank deposit. You can then run a deposit for one client, several or all clients at the same time. This same process can also be used for Remittance processing and ACH transfer processing with no additional effort.

Once the bank deposit is created, all the bank accounts in the Bank Account System are updated to reflect a deposit amount for each client, and, except for EFT transactions, the system generates a bank deposit ticket listing each item which can be used to transmit items to the bank. Different projects can share a bank account, or each project can have their own bank accounts.

Also, you can review and correct any posting errors prior to running the deposit process. This makes sure the deposit amount is correct.

Billing Statements

Each Client has been setup in the software to designate that all the residents in the property pay either by coupon, by customer/unit billing statements generated by our software, or that the resident receives neither of these. This setup also indicates how frequently the customers are to be invoiced. The billing statement process can be setup for each property to run monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually or annually. If billing statements are selected for the client, they will reflect all the customer/unit transactions since the last billing statement, including the anticipated charges for the next billing cycle.

This is important to understand. Let's assume a client has a monthly billing cycle. It is now July 20 and the TR module is currently in July. You want to send out billing statements to your residents so that they receive them prior to the first of the following month - when they are 'due'. Thus, you are running them prior to the charges actually being created for August. The software will create a statement that starts with the balance from the previous statement (sent out on or around the 20th of June - which includes the estimated recurring charges for July), adds any charges created or payments made since the last statement was created in June (but does not include the recurring charges for July since it is included in the beginning balance from the previous statement) and includes the estimated recurring charges for August.  In this example, as in all the others we might discuss, this means you do not want to send out statements for August after you have updated your TR module to August. The statements should always be printed while the TR module is in the month prior to the month the recurring charges are due!

These statements can be printed with a scan line that allows your bank to process the statements by machine. You can also sort the statements being printed in a number of different ways, including by customer/unit number, zip code or customer name. The statements are printed on 8 1/2 by 11 inch regular bond paper. You should make sure that this paper is 24 lb, and that a laser perforation is done on them exactly 3 1/2 inches down from the top and 3 1/2 inches up from the bottom.

You have the ability to place newsletter information on the billing statements or email statements for each client. You have approximately 23 lines of information available.

If a client is setup so that residents receive billing statements, some of those residents may be setup through their customer account maintenance to have ACH payments automatically deducted from their checking account. If this is true, you may not want these residents to receive a billing statement via the mail. You can set these residents up so that they receive their billing statement by email, saving time and expense for your clients.

Reports

There are many reports available within the TR module, including many different types of delinquent aging reports and miscellaneous utilities for labels and mass-mailing. All reports can be printed to the screen, can be printed to PDF or can be sent directly to your printer.

Miscellaneous Utilities

A few useful utilities will help you with the TR module. These include programs to change billing amounts on a group basis, to maintain newsletters, to scan the data base for payments, to prepare special letters and documents and to set up and maintain special transaction description codes for printing descriptions on statements.

End-of-Month Processes

These are the processes performed at the end of the monthly accounting period. They include creating delinquent charges on accounts, creating the monthly management fees charged to your clients, and creating the invoices for the next billing cycle. Monthly updating to the General Ledger System must occur to ensure accurate financial information. This monthly process has been streamlined and a checklist is available to take the user quickly through the necessary balancing and review steps.

One of the last functions of the month-end process is to update the TR module to the new month. After this update is done, the software then creates charges for all the residents. Make sure the module has been updated before you create posting records from residents for the new month. For example, if the TR module is in July, don't think that you can post August receipts and have them show up in August just because you entered a deposit date of August 3rd, for example. If the TR module is in July, all receipts posted will show up in July financials until you update T/R to August.