Number of Days in Advance
uCollect is designed to collect your invoices on their due date. When our automatic process runs each day we generate the payments for that day for API gateways. But for upload gateways (such as SEPA, NZ Banks ABA files) we notify you that payments are due and you have to log into generate the file and upload it to your internet banking manually. We realise that this often requires an extra person to authorise and it is often more convenient to load this up a few days ahead so that it is all ready to go.
Our "Number of Days in Advance" setting in your gateway configuration allows you to do just that.
Our default setting is 0 - which means that we test for the collection 0 days before the due date. If you change this setting to be greater than 0 we will look that many days into the future and include all the invoices due in the process. For example: if today is July 4 and NDIA is set to 3 then it will look for invoices due up to and including July 7).
When we generate the batches we will generate one batch for each payment date so that they can all be processed on the intended date. We record the payments in your accounting system using the due date, not the generation date. If you end up changing the date when you load this into your internet banking this may cause confusion on your customer statements or in your reconciliation process.
Please note that this setting does NOT change your collection date - just the date that the collection is seen by our routine. Setting NDIA to 5 will not mean that your invoices will be collected in 5 days - it means that we will prepare a file today for invoices to be collected 5 days from now. If you want to change the date that invoices are collected you need to change the due date of the invoice. Some banks will allow you to change the collection date on a batch when you upload the file which may be used to override our collection date, and some APIs only process in real time and ignore any collection date field. In these cases we will still post the collection on the scheduled date even if the bank actually processes it early.
Generally speaking we do not recommend that you use this setting on API gateways. The one exception is Forte PAD (Canada) and Forte ACH (USA) because the payments are always processed the day after they are initiated. You should set this setting to 1 so that the payments can be initiate the day before and debit your customer's bank statement on the due date.