We have decided to charge clients who persistently refuse to pay service charges for very long periods of time, building large debts.
My plan is to build this into my application, to retrieve outstanding invoices using the invoice search api (Status=“UNPAID”), then process each overdue invoice for a client, calculating a % charge per day, based on the BOE rates, then total them for the client.
The first part is fine, invoices are retrieved, but I just realised that the Due Date is not included. The due date is always 7 days after the issue date, so is that the reason?
Hopefully this is not a daft question, but in my defence I’m not an accountant..
Invoice_Search doesn’t include any due date information but if you drill down and Invoice_Get the individual invoices by their InvoiceID then the full detail response for each invoice includes the issue date and TermDays, from which you can calculate if it’s overdue and if so by how long.
Alternatively if you know that all your invoices are issued with the same terms then you could skip the Get, but I’m not sure what information the API will give you about part-paid invoices. I can’t see anything in the docs showing you how much is paid vs outstanding for a given invoice, or even any way to look up payments for a given invoice ID (as opposed to all payments for the client).
I’ll check with our accounts people. It looks like all the invoices have a due date 7 days after the issue date, in which case I can just work from that. I could invoice_get if not, although it would mean around 60 calls, not that thats really a problem.
There is a column returned for part payment amounts, so that bit is OK. Although I don’t think those with part payments are a problem, they usually have an agreement in place for that.
When most residents are prompted they tend to pay, but may need a lot of chasing.
We do have persistent offenders that are a problem, they just constantly ignore requests, and for two in particular they owe over a couple of years, so its a lot. We may end up having to pass them to a debt recovery company.
So we are trying to get those who eventually pay, to stop waiting until we send them nasty letters. The theory being that once people realise they will be charged a daily charge for late payment, everyone will start paying on time, and stop wasting the time of our staff having to endlessly chase them