[Susan Scott]

Our current procedure for chasing up outstanding commercial waste involves writing an individual letter to each debtor, utilising a template for which the value of the account must be entered manually. I have two concerns with this system: 1. It is labour intensive & time consuming & 2. There is room for human error when entering the outstanding balance value. I have made a couple of suggestions to our debtors clerk, both of which she has turned down as she feels that they wouldn’t hold up in the matter went to court, namely 1. A generic letter which accompanies the outstanding account statement without specifying the value or 2. A large red sticker that can be put on the account statement with very similar wording to the content of the current letter (but once again without a specific value). I would like to know how larger Councils handle their overdue debtors, please.

[Susan Pardy]

Hi Susan,
Just out of interest (to see if I can help), what finance system are you using?
Thanks Susan

[Susan Scott]

Hi Susan, we are on Civica – Authority.

[Tracey Walker]

Hi Susan,
Here at Wollongong we use Pathway. We have reminder letter template in the system that staff run once a month it populates the amount of the invoice, it has our payment options listed below and we also do follow up phone calls if there is no action from the reminder letter. If the debt remains unpaid we then either cancel the service and remove bin and/or take legal action to recover the amount if needed.

I am sure that Civica would have a similar process where it could produce letter templates.

[Susan Scott]

Thanks Tracey. That’s pretty much how things OUGHT to work, IMO – however, the problem is that Authority doesn’t extract the amount outstanding from the relevant field to populate the letter template (no matter what we try!); and also letters have to be run individually each account, which is very time consuming. There has to be a quicker way.
Do you have to produce the letters individually in Pathway; or is Pathway able to select the relevant accounts & produce all the needed letters collectively?

[Tracey Walker]

We run a bulk maintenance update on the 15th of each month which adds the code, then a query is ran in Pathway that selects those accounts and uploads onto the letter template. We then print the letters all at once and hand over to the internal printers to envelope and mail.

have you tried placing a call to Civica or any Council using Civica to see if a similar process can be implemented. Surely its just a field missing from the letter template, and maybe there is something that needs to be switched on in the back end to produce them in bulk.

[Susan Scott]

Thanks Tracey, I’ll find out if we can use a similar process with Authority.

[Author]

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