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Billing Center

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The following is a brief summary of the capabilities of the Billing Center.

 

After a Fee Schedule (Bill Group) has been populated and after accounts and portfolios have been assigned the appropriate Bill Group, the process of creating bills is reduced to selecting the billing period and to printing the bills.

 

The time to create bills will only be limited by the power of the computer you have and the speed of your printer.

 


Click on the Billing Center module at the Main Menu to access the Billing Center.

Go to Define Bill Groups.

Modifiable Bill Groups are intended to enable the user to put related accounts under a single, user defined billing schedule.

You can create as many different Bill Groups with different Fee Breakpoints for different investor investment situations as you like.

For example, you might have several different Bill Groups; for portfolios under $1,000,000.00, for portfolios over $1,000,000.00, for mutual fund accounts, for individual bonds, and equities portfolios, for trading accounts.

As most accounts will probably use the same schedule as defined by a Bill Group, @ Dup. the user can duplicate a Bill Group as many times as desired after entering the number of duplications and a starting ID number.

Exclude Cash & Include Cash Reserve Check Boxes

Cash may be shown two different ways in Investor's WorkStation; when allocating a portfolio, enter a cash reserve amount, or, when creating an Advisor Database (model portfolio), select and weight a cash-like investment for an investment sector within the Advisor Database; money market for example.

Using one cash entry option negates a need for using the other.

If you do not have cash as a weighted investment in the Advisor Database used, then you may opt to set a cash reserve when the portfolio is allocated. At that moment, if you decide to create a bill, the Cash Reserve will not be included unless you check the box titled Include Cash Reserve as it will not be "seen" as part of the portfolio.

Most of the time cash-like items are included in Advisor Databases as a weighted investment; therefore, when allocating a portfolio, Cash Reserve will not have to be used as the amount to be in cash reserve and will be defined by the weighting of the cash-like investment in the Advisor Database and the matrix intercept selected.

Assign Bill Groups

Go to Assign Bill Groups, select an investor (the Demo only has one), and assign a Billing Group number to each portfolio.

There are two ways to assign Bill Groups; one manual and one automatic with manual adjustments:

  • Go to each portfolio and assign a Bill Group one at a time as shown above.
  • Select Automatic Assignment to apply a single Bill Group to seemingly related accounts and single Bill Groups to seemingly unrelated accounts. Then modify where needed; by breaking up accounts incorrectly assigned to one Bill Group and by combining related accounts to a single Bill Group when missed when Automatic Assignment was first applied.

Automatic Assignment will automatically assign Bill Groups to all portfolios not yet assigned a Bill Group.

Portfolios with the same first two words in the account title will be assigned to the same Bill Group and unique portfolios will be automatically assigned an individual Bill Group number.

This feature would be use most often after adding or importing many portfolios for the first time to avoid having to go to each portfolio, one at a time, and assigning individual or combined portfolio Bill Groups to all portfolios.

The Automatic Assignment is not perfect when assigning seemingly related accounts to a single Bill Group; however, having to go back and correct a few will be much faster than assigning Bill Groups, single or multiple accounts, one at a time.

Programmer's Notes: Billing Center - Bill Group definitions. 'Dup' button now prompts for # to create. If only 1, no change. If more than 1 we prompt for a Group ID prefix to use (Max 5 characters). Then we create them as XXX-0001, XXX-0002, XXX-0003, etc... where the XXX is the prefix you enter. Note about this. Once we put together the whole Group ID, as in XXX-0002, we check to see if it exists already. If it does, we skip creating that one and move on. So if you said to make 100 using prefix XXX, then you did it again to make 200, we would only create the 2nd hundred the 2nd time you ran it.. 6. Billing Center - Automatic is the new way to link Bill groups to accounts using the 1st 2 words of the Investor Name to match.

Go to Billing Summary to Batch Run all bills for a selected billing period or select an individual Bill Group (assigned to one portfolio or multiple related portfolios) to print an individual bill.

Once each portfolio is assigned a Bill Group number, future billing requires only the selection of the billing period and the individual bill or batch billing Print option.

When you modify a portfolio, Investor's WorkStation automatically assigns the original Bill Group number to the new iteration of the prior portfolio.

Go to an investor and associated Billing Summary to review billing history and highlight an invoice and click on Print to print old bills.

Billing Center Letter Template

Enter the Word Processor at Edit Invoice to modify the mail merge billing letter.

See Help Billing Center Bill Letter Template to modify Billing Center template.

Sample of an invoice; page one, the invoice and page two, the Account Number(s), the Portfolio(s), and the Investor(s) linked to the selected Bill Group.