The MASterMind™ Business application billing and accounts receivable module allows you to create and maintain contracts for automatic recurring charges and payment generation, post and apply payments, create invoices and statements, and maintain detailed data for your General Ledger program for complete management of your back office functions.
Contract Management
The customer contract is the framework for tailoring your unique recurring services billing requirements and subsequent revenue recognition processing. All terms and conditions can be defaulted or customized and are presented clearly and concisely. Scanned images of any signed agreements associated with the contract can be attached to the digital contract record for easy reference.
Monthly fees and discounts for specific services can also be defaulted and customized. On-going price changes and maintenance are automated so that changes by specific groupings can be updated. Price changes also allows for the creation of “what if” scenarios, for example, “If I increase price, what happens at…?”
Contracts are associated with one customer but can used for billing multiple sites. Alternatively, different services for the same site can be billed to different customers. Examples include an HOA that might be billed for basic alarm monitoring services and the homeowner is billed for additional services such as fire monitoring on a separate contract. Billed services on the same contract can be grouped onto different invoices based on several factors such as service type or site address You can have as many billing cycles as needed to improve efficiency and prevent call volume spikes if everyone were billed at once. Frequencies can also be used for billing monthly, quarterly, annually or end of contract.
Recur lines can be defined as a flat fee for a service or for a specified per occurrence fee for monitoring activity. Flexible activity plans help you customize what kinds of events are billable, how to group the activity, whether the plan is prepaid, and the threshold over which activity becomes billable.
Several levels of invoice or statement groupings are available so that you can track detailed service revenue within the MASterMind application while summarizing a package price for bill presentation. Contracts can be open-ended or have an associated expiration date with user definable renewal terms. Recurring rate and revenue reports provide valuable information for your business analysis.
The MASterMind Business application offers dealer contract functionality for billing your customers with wholesale monitored sites. Among the standard features for these contract types are specialized activation fees, dealer standard monthly charges, recurring ceiling or tier price schemes based upon the number of monitored systems, and per-occurrence activity plans.
Automatic payment instructions can be assigned to a contract so that each time an invoice is generated, a corresponding payment is set up for debiting the customer’s bank or credit card account.
Recurring Billing
The recurring billing process uses the contract data to generate periodic invoices and their associated payments. The invoice provides the data for subsequent revenue recognition processing based upon your accounting periods and rules you can customize for consistency in calculating pro-rations.
The recurring billing process also handles contract terminations and adjusts the customer account accordingly. A customer might be due a credit if they were billed annually in advance and the contract was cancelled prior to the end of that service period. The cancellation could also trigger an acceleration to billing due to failing to fulfill the contract terms. In either case, the appropriate revenue recognition is adjusted as required to reflect the proper earning.
There are options for bill presentation to your customers. Invoices can be emailed, printed, and mailed, or sent to a print house if you have a customized format. You can choose to use open item or balance forward statements, either of which can be generated, printed, and mailed or sent to a print house to incorporate your custom formatting.
Cash Receipts and Collections
Cash receipts and collections are designed to meet your needs and the requirements of your customers. Cash transactions can be manually entered, imported from a file received from your financial institution, or generated based on one-time or recurring automatic payment methods that you send to a payment processor for collection. Credits can be configured to automatically apply to the oldest debit on the account when posted, and you can easily make manual application adjustments as needed.
Powerful collection rules allow you to define broad or very specific criteria for past due escalations. Options for different rules by customer type, aging, minimum balances, or MSIF multiplier are offered. The collection process evaluates each account and applies the correct collection level and next action.
Options are also provided for adjustment classifications. They can be defined by billing code with different GL distribution categories or broadly with non-financial credit reasons assigned for reporting. Credit and debit limits can be defined for an employee group or individual employees to aid in consistency and level of authority controls.
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