Process Now

While uCollect is designed to automate the collection of your receivables, sometimes you just need to do things manually.  You can switch off the automatic process at any time and uCollect will leave you with full control.  

To manually initiate the payment process you run the Process Now routine (from the Actions Menu).  This routine takes a few seconds to scan your invoices and then presents a screen like this:

Each gateway with available invoices is listed with the number and total of all invoices available.  If you click on the Total amount you will receive a list of invoices where you can suspend and un-suspend individual invoices as necessary.  This action will change the suspension state on the Search Contact screen as well.

There are four processing methods available for each gateway:

• Include All invoices will process all non-suspended invoices, including installments.  If no installment is present then the amount due will be collected in full if the invoice is due or past due.  If the invoice is suspended then it will not be collected at all.
• Installments Only will only process installments that are due or past due, but will ignore any invoices that do not have installments or which are suspended.
• Selected presents another screen where you can select the invoices/installments for inclusion in this batch.  Anything not selected will not be included now, but will remain available for another batch (we do not suspend invoices after this screen is processed).
  
• None will exclude this gateway from the process this time, but will keep it available for future runs.

There are two additional options available:

• Include 6 months old invoice: To help prevent unexpected collections we do not automatically collect invoices that are dated 6 months or more in the past.  You can override this by creating an installment plan on the invoice or by checking this box.  Once checked, ALL invoices over 6 months old will be attempted, so only use this if you are happy that they all be collected.
• Allow Reprocessing: To help prevent duplicate collections we do not collect the amount due on an invoice if we have previously had a successful reported collection on that same invoice number.  But sometimes there are good reasons for this.  To allow an invoice to be collected again you first need to remove the payment from the invoice in the accounting system.  Then you can either set up an installment plan for the invoice, or check this box to allow ALL invoices to skip this test.  This option is only available for upload gateways.  To reprocess an invoice in an API gateway you need to setup installments.

If you are using and upload gateway then the automatic routine only checks to see if you have invoices ready for collection, but does not generate the file until you log into uCollect and click the Generate Now button.