Account Hierarchy

 

Steps to Implement Account Hierarchy

 

Prerequisites

1. Customers must be sending Billtrust their collections data in the Standard Collections XML format.  
2. Two additional data fields must be populated in the data file.  Those fields are:

• Is_payment_center_contact (boolean) which indicates whether the account is a parent account or not. The customer must make sure that only 1 account is indicated as the parent account. 
  • 1=parent
  • 0=child
• Payment_center tag which should be the same for all parent and child account
  • This field can contain any value and usually will be the reference of the parent account. When this field is populated these accounts will all be grouped together in the account hierarchy page. 

 

How to Use

 

There are three functions that can be configured:

• Procedures can be executed at the Account Hierarchy level or at the Account level. When setting the procedures you can select the subject these can be of the following 2 values: 

• Account Hierarchy:  Procedures executed at the Account Hierarchy level will include the parent account and all child accounts.
• Account:  Procedures executed at the Account level will include only the child account.

• Reminders in an account procedure can be Escalated to the Parent
• Procedures of subject account hierarchy will only work with starting conditions and with the use of a step by step procedure. Since there is no procedure assigner of manual assignment of the account hierarchy procedures at this moment this is the only way to initiate these procedures
  • Statements can be created for the Account Hierarchy and configured for weekly or monthly delivery. There are 2 new starting conditions created for this. Note that these conditions are also applicable for the regular account procedures.
    

 

Procedure Setup

1. Create a New Procedure and to start the procedure, select “Whenever start-conditions are met”
   1. Account Hierarchy is not available for Procedure Assigner so you will not be able to select the subject account hierarchy when procedure assigner is selected. 

 

 

2. Select the subject of the procedure:
   1. Account for the procedure to be executed only on documents that exist at the child level.
   2. Account Hierarchy for the procedure to be executed on documents that exist for both the parent and children.

 

 

3. Add a Step:  If your procedure is configured for Account Hierarchy, you are limited to one of two actions:
   1. Reminder
   2. Warning

 

 

• Starting/progress/ending conditions for Account Hierarchy are shown below.
  • Starting conditions for an Account Hierarchy are similar to those conditions on the account level.  The main differences are:
    • Total are calculated over all documents for both parent and children
    • There are no custom fields as these don’t exist on the Account Hierarchy level.
  •   You can also select the day of the week or month to start the procedure.
    
    

 

Escalate to Parent

1. When configuring steps in your procedure you are able to escalate directly to the parent or CC the parent (email only). These options will only become available to you when account hierarchies are detected in your platform. 
2. Escalations include only the documents of the child account on which the procedure is active.  Parent documents are not included.

• If No, there is no change to how this currently works.
• If Yes, put parent in CC you will need to add the contact details of the parent to any digital communication (email, registered email, SMS, fax).  For emails, the parent will be cc’d, for SMS both the parent and child will receive the same message.

There are a few scenarios to consider when using this functionality:

1. Only the fallback channel is available for the parent, but both the primary and fallback channel are available to the child (or vice versa)
2. None of the channels are available for the parent, but are available for the child (or vice versa)
3. Only the primary channel is available for the parent, but only the fallback channel is available to the child (or vice versa)

In the situations mentioned above the system will communicate in the following way:

1. Send to both parent & child using the fallback channel
2. Don’t send anything, show a warning on the worksheet using the existing warning rules (mention that the primary channel is unavailable)
3. Don’t send anything, show a warning on the worksheet using the existing warning rules (mention that the primary channel is unavailable)

 

• If Yes, only to parent, emails will only be sent to the contact details of the parent. Both digital (email, registered email, SMS, fax) and on paper (the address of the parent will be used for the letter creation)

Statements

 

Finally, because using the Account Hierarchy could result in a large number of documents being displayed in email, the Account Statements can be limited to be sent only weekly or monthly.  This is also configured in the procedure settings where there are 2 new starting conditions to be able to do this.

 

• Select Current day is <day of the week>
  • Select Day of the Week
• Select it is day <day number> of the month
  • Enter a number between 1 and 31 to indicate the day each month the account statement should be sent.

 

NOTES:

 

• Debtor, client, customer are all now named Account in the BT Collections application.
• When procedures executed on the Account Hierarchy are executed, a note is added.
• If a procedure is running for the account hierarchy the procedure will be shown in the top bar for every child and parent account. 

 

 

• Payment Center is renamed to Account Hierarchy and the Parent account can be accessed from the left nav.
  • The overview displays the child accounts
  • Totals for the parent and child accounts.