Billing: Fee Notes

Fee notes are short statements detailing fees, drugs, VAT and payments. They are most suitable for small animal clients, who do not require a full-blown VAT invoice.

A client will be sent a fee note if the bill type field on their record card is set to 'F'.

To run the Fee note program you need to select Fee Note from the Invoice production menu. A screen containing the various options will be displayed, for example:

1.  Client range            : All
2.  Fee note will be        : Printed
3.  Client type             : All
4.  Stage 1 bills           : Yes
5.  Stage 2 bills           : Yes      Age (days) : 30
6.  Stage 3 bills           : Yes      Age (days) : 60
7.  Stage 4 bills           : Yes      Age (days) : 90
8.  Add stage letters       : Yes
9.  Include the summary     : No
10.  Discount date          : 15.02.1998
11.  Surcharge date         : 23.02.1998
12.  Status codes to ignore : BD
13.  Automatic surcharges   : No
14.  Minimum bill amount    : 5.00
15.  Merge Filename         : 

You will notice that each option is assigned a number. To change the setting of an option, simply select the appropriate number and edit as required. Once you are satisfied the fee note options are correct, press enter to start the program running.

Notes:

• Fee notes are normally printed in alphabetical order. You can however change the option:

  General -> Parameters -> Fields -> Options -> More -> 16
  

  to revert to running numerically.

• Minimum Bill amount applies to credits as well, in the above example the amount is 5.00 - this will only include animals with a balance between -5.00 and 5.00.

• You can set the fee notes to ignore clients with particular status codes. As many as 10 status codes may be ignored. (Remember status codes have two character fields. If some of your status codes are single character, separate them from the rest of you status code with blank spaces).

• Fee note will be: can be set to output a file which can be used with external word processors rather than printed. The format of the file is client number, animal name(s), address lines, last paid date, last seen date, balance due, bill stage, surcharge and discount amount. The event screen on the management record will be updated as event 17.

• Normally the fee notes will be sent to your current default printer, if you set FeeNote_Printer = letter in params.txt to a printer letter the letters will be sent to this printer for all screens/users.

The layout of the fee-note is as set up in the fee-note definition file, 'bill.def' and is covered later.

See Also: