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General Billing Information

Main Menu - Billing - General

Mainly used to control taxes and other additional monthly payments (AMP). Also used as a gateway to the additional monthly payments master codes maintenance.

Layout
The Suspend Billing field is used to temporarily stop billing for active leases. It has no effect on terminated leases. If you suspend billing and a number of months have passed, unsuspending billing will cause the unbilled months to be all billed at once for the next billing run. If this is not desired and you only want one month billed, then you should consider changing the next payment due date on the Amortization screen.

The Print statement when billing is run field is used to control whether or not you want a statement to print for this deal when the lease billing or loan statement procedures are run. For weekly due dates, it is recommended to set this to "Never." The "Only if amt owed > 0" option means that a statement will never be generated unless there is any amount owed. This option works great in the event where payments are posted before the billing procedure is run, and you only wish to see statements where a customer has not yet paid in full through the upcoming due date.

The Special Amount for Multiple Payment Post field is used in conjunction with the multiple payment post screen. If the lessee has been paying an amount other than the normal monthly payment amount, then entering that amount here will speed up payment posting.

The remainder of the screen is dedicated to additional monthly payments. An additional monthly payment is anything that is added to the base principal and interest (base portion) of the monthly payment. This is normally sales/use taxes, but may be monthly reserve, expense reserve, etc. AMP code maintenance is discussed in the next section.

The "Accum.?" column is for taxes and is used to indicated whether or not tax rates are to be treated separately or accumulatively. For example, a total tax rate of 7% in Minnesota is broken down to 6.5% state tax and 0.5% city tax. With the accumulative flags on, the tax is calculated at 7%, and then broken down to the 6.5% and 0.5%. By default, U.S. taxes are accumulative.

Canadian taxes are NOT accumulative. GST and PST are to be calculated separately.

If you need to calculate a tax off of a reduced base payment (because it contains non-taxable amounts), then you may override the percentage by checking the Override Perc box, and then entering a percentage into the Override % field. This percentage would be the percentage of how much of the base payment is taxable. For example:

Base Payment = $395.47
Tax Rate = 5.5%
Taxable Portion of Base Payment = $110.73, or 28% (110.73 / 395.47 = .279995954)

In this example you would go to the tax rates that have been marked for usage, mark the Override Perc box, and then enter 28 into the Override % field. (You can also be more precise and enter 27.99960 if you want.) As a result, the tax will calculate as $6.09. (395.47 * .055 * .28 = 6.090238)

The Billing or Loan Statement Message is used to print a message on the lease or loan statement specifically to the deal. It overrides the location message.

How To
Each lease may have up to eight AMP codes assigned. AMP codes must be defined before they can be used. AMP master codes are typically defined as new deals are added to ALMSys, but they may be defined from this screen as well.

To delete a code assignment to this deal, press the corresponding delete button located at the end of the line.

AMPTax Mastercode Maintenance
Press the Add Code / AMPTax Maintenance button to open the Select AMP/Tax Code selection grid. 

To assign an existing AMP code to this deal, select it on the grid and press OK.

To create a new AMP/Tax master code, press the New Code button. The Tax / Additional Monthly Payment Master Code screen will be displayed. (Click on the link for how this screen works.)

To edit an existing master code, press the Edit Code button. Again the Tax / Additional Monthly Payment Master Code screen will be displayed. (Click on the link for how this screen works.)

How to Create Coupons
There are two ways to create payment coupons: 1) From with this screen, printing on your own paper stock, and 2) From an external source

If you have your own coupon paper stock, then click the screen report button and select "Payment Coupons." You will be provided with a screen to tell the program how many coupons to print (from the first unbilled payment due) and the order of the coupons.

If you have an external company that creates coupon books for you, then click the Request External Coupons button. This will show a screen where you may select the starting and ending coupon number. Click OK to add the coupon request to the current batch for the external processor. To create the batch for the external processor, go to the Coupons Export screen.

Reports
General Billing
Payment Coupons. By default, generated for the unbilled payments that are remaining in the term. You may override the number of coupons to print, as well as to specify that you want the coupons to print in a "tear-friendly" order.