Billing: Fee Notes and Stage Letters

As the bills get progressively older, you may wish to include a message of increasing severity.

When a fee note is generated, the system will determine the age of the debt by looking at the last consultation date on the client's record. It will work out the number of days from that date until the start date of the fee note run (NOT the date of the run) to determine the debt age. It will use this age to decide which message should appear on the client's fee note.

Once you have told Premvet 5 to use stage letters, the system will check your hard drive for the appropriate text. Your warnings are held in the following files:

If any of these files exist, Premvet 5 will select the file appropriate to the delay in payment, and append the associated warning message to the fee note.

Note: These files are definition files that control the way your fee notes look. You'll learn more about this type of file later in the chapter. For future reference, this note concerns the printing of fee notes and associated warnings. You can print warnings on the fee notes themselves, or on separate sheets of paper. If you want your warnings to print on a separate sheet to the fee note, the bill stage definition files (e.g. bill.s1) MUST be configured to have the same paper length as the fee note definition file. Alternatively, you can print the warnings on the same sheet as the fee note. In this case the total length of the fee note definition file and the bill stage definition file must add up to the length of the paper you are using. Because you are then using two files to achieve the correct paper length, you will always need to tell Premvet 5 to use stage letters on a billing run. However, one of your bill stage definition files may be 'blank' to act as a space-filler where fee-notes do not need to carry a warning.

You can easily alter the number of days which trigger each message. During the fee note run, enter 'N' when Premvet 5 asks 'Send all stages of bills?'. The system will now ask you which stages to send - 'Send stage X bills' - you should answer 'Y' to each stage. Premvet 5 will prompt you for the value of X, i.e. the number of days, in each case.

Note: The value of X is the number of days elapsed since the last consultation, NOT since the last warning. For example, stage 1 might be bills aged between 1 and 30 days, stage 2 would be 31-45 days, and so on. In this case you answer 30 for the stage 1 age and 45 for the stage 2 age.