Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our host Bret Alarcon is joined by EDU Manager, Zach Malloch, and Technical Writer, Julia Shefcheck, to discuss various refund-related tips and tricks. The group walks through various financial settings in the system as they relate to refunds, different refund scenarios, and methods for processing bulk refunds.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:08
Hello and welcome to this week's edition of RecChat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today, Zach's going to be talking about refunds, cancellations correct and refunds, even some refunds specific settings. So stick around and to learn all about refunds. If you have any questions during the presentation, ask them in that little q&a section down below. And then if you have any comments you'd like to make, we also have a little chat section there for you as well. We also have Julia with us, she's going to be helping out with some questions and just basically monitoring some stuff to give us a hand during the presentation. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Zack, and you can take it away.
Zach Malloch 0:49
Thank you very much, Brett. How's everybody doing today?
Bret Alarcon 0:52
Excellent.
Zach Malloch 0:53
Awesome. Glad to hear that. I see. We've got a lot of attendees jumping, jumping in, and a couple of people still joining in. So welcome everybody from all over the place today. I mean, what's more holiday ish than talking about refunds, you know, you get up in the morning, Christmas Day, you have all the refunds under your Christmas tree, we talk about refund processing, with your friends and family slept on the hot chocolate. Just nothing gets me in the mood quite like refunds. All right. So I don't know if everybody shares my appreciation of that. But hopefully by the end of the session, you will, I'm going to share my Screen so we can go ahead and get started. So there's I saw a couple of questions come in from the registrations, where people are curious a bit about some of the settings for refunds. So I want to kind of go over the various areas of the system where we can control that. And also talk about like kind of how it affects the system. So one of the first areas that I'm going to go to is static parameters. So I'm in Profile assignments, I have my static Parameters Button to get to that static parameter Profile. And then we have our financial and GL settings over on the right hand side of the Screen once this loads, so there's a financial settings. And we have these four areas where we're traditionally kind of related to refunds.
Zach Malloch 2:12
Depending on when you guys started using RecTrac, depending on when you move to RecTrac, 3.1. And depending on when you potentially were a new customer on RecTrac 3.1, we might have only had one account number, we might have only had one account number replicated between these fields. The control account in versions 10.3 And earlier was really our refund account and our wash account. So it was doing a lot of double duty sort of stuff. And we gave the ability of splitting out these four different functions, because they really are four different functions. So theoretically, they should be controlled by four different areas of the system. So the control account, I'll go ahead and make a statement that should be true, assuming that a couple of caveats are in place. One, you've always had a control account that's separate from the rest of the refund pieces of the system. And you've never had any kind of system bugs pop up where there was an incomplete transaction or something along those lines. But if this has been its own unique thing, the control account should never have had a balance in it basically ever, we use this kind of in in line. So in RecTrac 3.1. As soon as we put something in the shopping cart, we're already making entries into the GL and everything. So if you're cancelling out of an activity, we're taking the money out of that revenue. And where does the money go? Well, we're taking it out of revenue, it has to be somewhere while we're waiting to see what the rest of the transaction is going to look like whether you're applying that, that balance to another activity, and you're going to credit something else, whether you're going to refund that balance out. So until we make that decision, while it's kind of in that shop shopping cart, it's like a suspense account. The money is in there, and then it's backed out once the transaction is finished. So you might see an entry of a credit into the control account. And you should see almost always see in an immediate corresponding debit to the control account. And sometimes we even just back out if they do equals zero and we just show the the end results.
Zach Malloch 4:07
Excuse me, then we have a refund, apply refund finance and refund now GL codes. And so these would control the various other types of refunds that we have. So refund apply is going to be your household credit. And this would be your household credit. Uh, basically across the system. These are our defaults. And afterward I'm looking at this we'll also look at fees because we can override these defaults on a fee by fee basis. So if you want to have a different control account for your activities than you did for your passes, we could theoretically do something like that. Refund finance should really reference your accounts payable account on the financial side of things. Basically what happens is when we cancel out of an activity, we put that credit into a refund finance account. The idea is that would eventually be cut as a check to one of your customers. So the refund finance account should probably be the same as your refund, I'm sorry, your accounts payable account in the financial system. And then refund now or void is just once again, it's kind of this temporary holding place where we'll see the money going into this account. When we're creating the credit by canceling out an activity or reducing a fee or cancelling out of an extra charge for Facility Reservation, we're giving credit to the household and then we're going to give that as a refund now, see the credit into the refund now account and should have an immediate corresponding debit to that refund now account with the proper pay code attached to it.
Zach Malloch 5:32
So they're just kind of their accounts that facilitate the flow of refunds through RecTrac. And so in the static parameters is where we set these defaults. Now, if we look at fi and we go to the Advanced fee change, then we can get in and over here, we also have our GL settings on the right hand side. And so we can set a different refund apply finance, and now GL Code and we also have this refund GL Code. Now this one, I think we should probably at some point, change the description. So it says refund offset GL Code just so it's a little bit more distinct from the other pieces. I'll talk about this last so refund, apply finance, and now would just be if these GL codes would need to be different here than whatever's at the default. If you have those default accounts, and you only need those three, then we really don't need to worry about adjusting them or ever setting anything at the fee by fee level. Now what this refund GL Code is, as I was saying it's a refund offset GL Code. So normally, if I was taking a fee of 3150, it would go into in this case GL Code number five, and I would see that as credit to my revenue. And normally speaking, when I cancel out of this, if I was refunding this balance, I would be taking 3150 out of revenue code number five, so it went into five and one out of five. Now Revenue Code five balances $0. What the offset GL Code does is basically I can just choose a different code here, I'll just use 100, since it's very easy to distinguish. So basically, what would happen here is I'd always be taking the income and I would be putting these deposits into GL Code number five. So I'd see a credit of 3150 and two GL Code number five. And then when I cancel it, if I did a refund now, a refund apply or refund finance, it would go against this GL Code, I would take the 3150 out of a different code. So that I then have one that shows all the money that came in throughout the year and a different code that shows all the money going out throughout the year. And we have to remember to net those together, because revenue would never go down after it goes in there, you're just kind of keeping it in place. So not a lot of people are doing the offset refund to GL codes. But that is kind of an important thing to understand how the finances might flow through the system and what sorts of things might be affecting those. If they're I don't see any questions at the moment about that. So
Bret Alarcon 8:01
we do have some questions about what am about default codes. Ricky wants to know, is there any way we can have refund apply hid the charge code specifically tied to the transaction instead of a default code?
Zach Malloch 8:17
So there's two ways I'll answer that. And I'm not sure which way see some people are noticing the cat's destroying thing in the background, so I've got an infestation of these guys at the moment. So if you hear crashes or calamity, that's what's going on in the back. And I can always bring them out if the if the pace of the system drags or the the pace of the session drags at any point. So the question before was about refund apply. So rather than going to a default just go based on whatever the original transaction was. And so each transaction is going to be charged to whatever this the revenue GL Code, the credit is going to put in there any money we take in based on this fee is going into that account. Now whenever we cancel out of this, unless we're using this offset refund GL Code, let's pretend we're not because most of our customers are going to be like this. We're always taking money out of this code as the first step of basically any refund process. And then the refund apply refund finance or refund now codes are just where we're going to hold that money now that it has come out of that particular revenue code. So I think what you're asking is already being done or always taking the money out of the original code where the money was taken in. This is just a holding account. And I don't think you'd want the holding account to be the original revenue code. In each case. I suppose Putin if you really wanted to, I think this would be a really you definitely want to I'll say this You definitely want to check with finance. I won't give you this suggestion without the approval of your finance department. But if you put the refund apply GL Code to match your revenue GL Code, then it would basically keep the money in revenue until somebody used that credit. But once again, that's not really good financial practice. As soon as that money becomes a credit, it's technically a liability at that point rather rather than revenue, and you really don't want to hold it in a revenue account. Because then you're overstating revenue. And and as soon as that person uses that credit, or ask for their actual refund, to get back as a check or credit to their credit card or something like that, then you're taking money out of revenue that you didn't anticipate would be there. So I think that answers your question, hopefully. But it's just a standard part of every refund is that we are going to take the money out of revenue, unless we're using this offset, refund GL Code. All right. Were there any other questions at the moment?
Bret Alarcon 10:51
Yes. Once more missing credit card transactions on reports. I don't know if you want to save that one for little later or if you want to get into that now.
Zach Malloch 11:01
Yeah, so we'll have to that that might be a kind of a specific one. I'm going to talk too broadly, a couple of ways that credit card transactions work. But I see Alicia has the question. I'm assuming Bret. Yeah. So if it is a specific transaction, where you're you're not seeing it, then that might need to be support working with you to try to find that, but we'll see what time we have at the end of the session. So yeah, just then actually, while we're in here, there's one other thing I really wanted to mention. So this is kind of like how the refunds work. So refund now is giving the money back to the customer right now. So if you had cash in your cash drawer, you're taking it out of the cash drawer and handing it to the customer. If they came in earlier in the day, and they gave you a check, and they come to the same cash register. And they say, oh, you know what, nevermind, cancel that transaction, you can physically give them the check back and technically do a refund now via check. Normally, that's not going to be the case, but it is possible. So there was a refund. Now, this refund voids are exactly the same thing, except they have a different code. And the main reason for that is so that you as a manager or supervisor could potentially report on your refunds at the end of the month, and see how many refund voids happened and refund voids, if you're going to be doing something like that the purpose behind them is really to make them they're what we use when a clerk makes an error. When there's a problem with the system, maybe the fee was set up incorrectly in the system, we need to go in there and make an adjustment, we're going to show it as a refund void because it was something on either side, that was the problem rather than a customer coming in and saying that they actually legitimately wanted a refund. So it's mainly it's a coding difference. So you can see if there's a lot of refund voids happening, which means that potentially there's a lot of errors at one particular station versus another.
Zach Malloch 12:54
The other thing is going back to this additional GL is that a refund void will always ignore this refund offset code. So it always takes money out of the GL Code. And if you think about it, once again, the idea behind refund void is you're using that when there is a problem transaction that you made an error on so you're correcting it, you wouldn't want it to actually have ever shown as revenue. So you're just taking it right back out of that. So it is kind of a subtle thing, but it's an important thing to understand. And actually, I was curious, I didn't actually make the poll for this. But maybe we could take an informal one. If anybody does use the refund void pay code, if that's a part of your day to day processing, or your training for your front desk staff, I'd be really curious. Just you know, maybe say yet we do that in the chat. Um, kind of it always feels like refund void is kind of like, because it's that extra level of training for the front desk. It's not something that a lot of people are using. But I'm I'm curious if that's an accurate impression or not. So that's refund now and refund void, you're getting money out of the Cash drawer immediately with a refund apply. That's the credit. So once again, we're immediately taking money out of this refund GL Code and we're putting it into the refund apply GL Code, whatever's in the static parameter or actually attached specifically on that fee. And we're holding it there until the customer decides to use it as a control account entry, they're using their credit to pay for something else. So that's what refund supplies are, and then refund finance. We have a code here once again, I mentioned that that GL should usually reference your financial accounts payable code. And in this case, you're basically promising the customers that you're going to cut them a check at some point a lot of people you have to wait until the board meets so you can customize the comment code that comes with a refund finance to say like you know, this is subject to the board every other week we have a finalization meeting or whatever to kind of give body give people a sense of when they can expect it and print on the receipt and all that sort of stuff. But I also sometimes Just call it refund later to counteract the refund now idea. All right. So I see that we only see one person that says they're actually using refunds. So refund void. So that's interesting. Thank you, Linda for replying to that and few people that are not using it. Yeah, it seems more likely that they're not being used. Usually refund now is an acceptable way to correct transactions also. But actually I'm curious. Linda, if do you guys use it to try to find out if people are having particular transactions, or do you report on that to distinguish what's going on?
Bret Alarcon 15:36
So looks like Darla uses it, too.
Zach Malloch 15:39
Oh, yeah. Same question to Darla, I missed our last response there. Question in a round? Yeah, gotcha. All right. Okay, so I wanted to very briefly mention something else about refunds. This came as a question when we were coming in here. So if we go to our activity section management, and if I highlight a section, and if I go to more, I can cancel the section. And so this cancellation would then cancel out everybody that's enrolled in this and I might have multiple people that are attached this now I have a couple of options, I only have apply or finance. So this doesn't tie in to anybody that would have paid by credit cards, we can't automatically refund credit cards. But we could invoke this case, this class had nine people registered for it. Say that I want to give the every one of their households a credit, given them a refund apply. Or I could say that each one of them wants to have a refund finance cut, then I gathered those receipts, I hand them over to the finance department and the finance department will go out and cut those checks in send them out. So we do have a bulk refund option if you needed to refund to everybody that was enrolled in a particular activity. But it does have the limitation of only being refund apply or refund finance as the options that you give there. So hopefully that helps with that question that came in. And bread I think I see some other stuff coming into. Yeah, actually. And and just a reiterate real quick that chat is great. Thank you so much for using that for the refund void refund now for our response. But if you have any other questions that you want us to like kind of go over a process. If you could put those into the question and answer the actual q&a piece that just helps us distinguish those a little bit more and make sure that we're we're hitting all those clearly. Was there anything that you picked up on the Bret?
Bret Alarcon 17:35
Oh, yeah, so some responses to your refund void over at Genesee Michigan, they use refund void to fix cashier or lender uses refund void because they processed them in a group at the end of the at the end of the shift after the clerk has kept notes on what needs to be backed out. And Darla uses it when truly void in transaction or writing off a transaction. I'm also the only one that can process a refund void and we don't use it much.
Zach Malloch 18:05
Perfect. All right. That's good information. Thank you all for for sharing that insight into your business processes. All right. And I thought maybe I saw somebody asking about particular process about
Bret Alarcon 18:20
Yeah, Coleen wants to know, can you go over how to apply a credit of a portion of a fee?
Zach Malloch 18:27
Yeah. So let's just go to global sales real quick. I'll see if I have somebody I can do a cancellation. Usually I have a couple of ripe transactions on my locker haven't household. Forgot to notice if that was a debit or credit balance that they have here, but we'll find out. So purchase history. So they owe $9 For that they've paid $325 for this one. So let's go ahead and pay this old balance. Nope, nope, sorry, we're canceling my head, cancel that guy. And so that's going to give us a credit of $325. So I'll go to my refund Screen. It tells me that I originally paid for this with cash and maybe refund now would be an appropriate option. But if I have refund now selected, then I'm just going to choose that I want to refund all of this just right to one thing. Now I can do this kind of like a split payment however. So if I wanted to say well, we're going to give $100 back as cash because maybe none of my cashiers start with more than $100 and I have an internal policy that Max refund or Max Max refund any particular days $100 of cash. So I add that to this area. So now I have $225 rather than $325 Still to refund. And so maybe in that case, I'll just adjust that and they're going to keep that as a household credit. So now I add that and in this case, I would be giving them $100 back as cash and leaving $225 on the on the household as a credit. And we could also split this up, we could do it three ways we could do refund now to cash, we could do a portion of it as refund finances and then check back and then the remainder is refund apply or any combination. But we're basically using this add, you know, it would say a refund if we still had a mountains to refund this ad refund Button and building it like a split payment would be if we're doing it or applying it to a standard transaction. Let's see another question come up, Brent.
Bret Alarcon 20:30
Yes. Excuse me. Deborah wants to know how to echeck refunds work?
Zach Malloch 20:36
That's very good question. And that might be something that we need to come back to. I believe that that logic is just being added to, to PayTrac. So we will have some further discussions about that in probably a future rec chat session. But I actually don't want to talk to that yet. Because I am not actually certain. Deborah, we can now I'll have somebody follow up with you specifically. And then like I said, we'll maybe have a topic about this. Specifically, once that feature is fully addressed for PayTrac.
Bret Alarcon 21:12
Looks like Joseph has a question that something you were just talking about, let's know, is it the same with same process when prorating.
Zach Malloch 21:21
So same process when prorating proration would happen before we get to this Screen. So proration is a little bit more of a fee setup Type of thing. But we could let's just say we're doing this building at the Round Lake we're refunding all this money. So if I go and I update my fees from this, then I see that we're basically keeping zero of each of these. If I wanted to keep some of it, I could say well, I'm going to keep $50 There, I hit continue. And so now I'm keeping 50, and I'm only going to refund 275. So if you wanted to manually figure out the proration, you can do that just by updating the fees. However, if you know what Type of proration you're trying to accomplish, I'm going into our advanced fee change Screen and over on the miscellaneous sides, we have purchase proration, and we have cancellation proration. So purchase would give you a lower fee when you're charging somebody for an activity or something that's already started, and they're registering for the remainder of something. And then our cancel proration would be if you're canceling out of something before it's done. And so you have the option of canceling by if it's an activity class account usually makes a lot of sense. So you've attended five classes and you cancel out for the remaining five, so you get 50% of your money back. Or if it's a pass or membership Type of thing. Sometimes people do those daily or monthly, it just depends on when you want the the calculation to occur. I talked a little bit more about permission, our virtual symposium about advanced Fee Management. But hopefully that helps a little bit. It's a little bit outside of the scope. But this is a way to automate the proration. Updating fees from the cart when you're doing the refund is a way to manually control exactly how much of a refund you're going to give and how much you want to keep. And actually I saw another question in there, I think asking about deposits. And it's basically the same answer as what I just mentioned there. So if we go to global sales, and we go to purchase history, let's just say that we had a deposit on this one. Now technically, in this case, I would go to deposit refund. Now I probably actually do have deposits listed here. So this is the amount of deposit I'm keeping. And so I would just reduce this down. If I give them all the money back, I just reduced that to zero, and that's going to prompt me to refund them to $200. If however I say well, I'm going to give them I'm going to keep $100 to cover the damage that occurred, then they would get the refund of the difference. They're the $210. So same idea. This is basically giving you the update deposit from cart is basically the the corresponding thing to what I just did over here with the update fees from cart.
Bret Alarcon 24:04
Alright, so now we're gonna throw taxes in the mix. If you give a refund that had taxes included, how do you make sure the tax is refunded as well.
Zach Malloch 24:12
So that should just be an automatic part of the transaction. And that that comes back to our fee process here. So if we have a fee with taxes attached to it, so we would have our tax table, and within the tax table we define I'll go ahead and change this here. So the tax table has general ledger codes linked to it. So I go over to the actual tax table apart this 5% city tax is linking to this GL Code 1% municipal tax is linked to a separate GL Code. So we know that when we originally process the transaction, we're putting a percentage of the money into each of these codes. And we know when to cancel it that we're taking that much money out of each of those codes. So that should also be an automatic process there.
Bret Alarcon 25:03
Let's see why the difference of 45 days and RecTrac versus 100 days, 80 days and WebTrac to refund back to a credit card?
Zach Malloch 25:12
That's a good question. I don't know specifically for that one, Kate. But I can talk kind of broadly against our towards this. So yeah, we might be able to talk to Zack Daly or somebody from the sales side to see about the PayTrac. And like, what the logic is behind that. But the there was a broad question that came in there was talking about basically refunding to a credit card. So right now with all of our providers, you have to basically refund directly from a credit card transaction back to the credit card, if there's an intermediate step, if you refund the part of it in a different way, or put it on the household credit, and they want it back on their card later, really can't do that. Because we're breaking the chain of linking that credit card to actual transaction number to the actual receipt number. And as soon as that chain is broken, it's hard to reestablish, and for most of our providers, we can't re establish that link. That being said, PayTrac is the the exception to that rule. So anybody that's a PayTrac user, there is a way to configure it, we won't go into the details of how to do that right now. But you basically set up a separate pay code that is your manual, your blind credit card, credit code. So basically, by using that you could do a refund, apply, make it a refund, now, like refund your credit now and then credit it back to a card even if it's not tied to the original receipt, as long as you have that card number. Once again, that's a PayTrac only thing right now, the other providers, you do have to maintain that that chain from the receipt number all the way through to the credit card refund directly. So hopefully that helps. But as I said, Oh, and Jerry just asked if the credit card expired, can I put a new credit card to refund with the PayTrac? Option? Yes, it is a blind credit card refund. So that means you also want to be careful with that you don't want to have everybody have access to that particular pay code because they could apply any payment to any credit card number. But it is something that you could do. Jerry, go ahead and give? Or actually maybe I'll reach out to Cullen and I'll have him give somebody or have somebody give you an email. Assuming that you are PayTrac user, then you should be able to have somebody Okay, so
Bret Alarcon 27:30
it's kind of goes with Anna's question, although I don't know if she's PayTrac user. But is there a way to override a refund link to one specific receipt, for example, when a payment was used on a card in the amount of $200. But then the customer needs to receive a greater refund, is there a way to unlink the receipts instead of having to refund via a different option?
Zach Malloch 27:54
Unfortunately, no. So you you can't refund more than the value of a receipt to the card. And depending on which interface it is, I feel like PlugnPay, maybe it was pretty specific about matching up the exact amount, whereas like ETS was it had to be the same amount or lower, it could be lower. But I'm a little bit foggy on that right now. And I don't believe that there's any way to really split that out. Now, most cases, the answer to a refund that can't be a refund now to a credit card is going to be doing it as a refund finance, you're cutting a check you're sending it to the customer, then of course they can deposit it and apply it as a credit to their credit card. So we're at most, a little a few days away from resolving that issue just by doing a refund finance instead of a refund now to the credit card, but I understand people want their money back and they want it as quickly as possible as seamlessly as possible. There are some limitations with the other providers because we control a little bit more PayTrac That is why we have the option of doing this buying credit through RecTrac There.
Bret Alarcon 29:01
Alright, Benjamin has a question. I'm not quite sure if I follow Benjamin but is there any chance of getting a refund now credit card for activity cancellations on the roadmap? Or is that not feasible? Maybe with a fallback to refund apply if the credit card info is invalid. The boat cancellations at the start or during COVID shutdowns are incredibly difficult. Without this option, we ended up with a two part process the first cancel everything with refund apply and then hit each household to refund back to the credit
Zach Malloch 29:35
card. Yeah, so what we're talking about here is the bulk cancellation and basically adding an option to do a refund now in the case that a credit card exists. I feel like that is probably something that has already been put through as enhancement requests and there's potentially some sort of a development issue with why we can't do that or I I have an issue with our credit card providers. But maybe we could. Brett, could you maybe make a note for that one to be added to, as as a write up?
Bret Alarcon 30:09
Sure.
Zach Malloch 30:11
And we will, we'll see what we can do. As far as that goes, I definitely get your point, I understand the whole process and why that would be very useful. So maybe we can get that added at some point. We are at 230 already. And as always, time flies when you're talking about refunds. I told you it was a fun topic. We will stick around and keep answering some questions. But I wanted to appreciate everybody's time that was able to join today. And if anybody does need to leave, as always, we will be posting this as a recording to the RecChat archives. So please feel free to come in and jump ahead and 30 minutes and see what else is after that to catch up on anything that you might miss. But yeah, if we still have some questions, Brett, let's keep going.
Bret Alarcon 30:52
Let's see Coleen. In the help Screen, it seemed that you could use roster or fee charge, or sorry, change in order to put a credit on everyone signed up for the particular activity. That is not the entire fee is just a discount. Is this correct?
Zach Malloch 31:09
Let's see. Can you remind us? Nope, yep. So here's our roster fee change, let's go ahead and take a look at this program. So if we decrease these fees, then what are our options, refund options, refund finance, or refund apply. So basically the same options as the bullet cancellation. With the cancellation, we're just cancelling the transaction. And assuming we're refunding any fee that doesn't have the cancellation transaction Type attached to it. With this one, we get to specifically see the fees that were charged at the particular time. And we can make adjustments to these and then apply the refunds based upon that. So I've been I guess, what was the rest of the question?
Bret Alarcon 31:54
Is that the entire fee? It is just a discount? Is that correct? Thanks.
Zach Malloch 31:58
Well, I mean, I suppose we could adjust the fee by the full value, if that's what you were interested in doing. At that point, if you're trying to give them the full refund. I'm curious if you would just do the cancellation. Like if there's a reason you want to keep them on the roster versus making this adjustment or canceling them and getting them off. But yeah, I think you could make the fee change the full amount to reduce it down to everything. And actually, I'm not sure if I would have to test this. I don't actually know for sure if saying $20 means reduce it by $20. Or if $20 means make the fee $20. I'm assuming because we have the option of changing by increase or decrease that that saying what this change should do. So decrease by 20 should bring it down to zero. I see. Dana had a real quick question about how do we watch it, I just want to show that real quick. So if I go to vermontsystems.com. And I go to our Support tab, and I Click on the support Button, that brings us to the support portal. So if you, you would need to log in here. But if you have ever created a ticket online, or if you have any times that you've called in with us, you have an account here, so you could try to put in your email address and request a password reset. But under the Support tab, if we change this to rec chat, then these are all of the archives. So every rec chat, I think we have 47 of them at this point from the past couple of years are all going to be here. So by the end of the day tomorrow, I imagined that this one would be up as long as Brett has the opportunity to do that for us. And I think I'm going to do it before I leave the office. Yeah, perfect. So that should be by the end of the day today. What else do we have for questions outstanding?
Bret Alarcon 33:54
Jerry wants to know, when you do a refund finance to send a check? Why do you have two areas or lines? We use it for our Pio numbers, but what is it designed for?
Zach Malloch 34:07
So I think that this was actually just our best guess as far as what sort of process or it was following the process of the first person we wrote it for. I think the idea is that one of the lines on the check would be for the supervisor that's covering the order for the clerk if it's authorizing the thing, yes, we do want to make this request, then we physically hand that receipt through a process to finance and when they're actually cutting the check, then they sign off on it or maybe the board member has to sign off on it and then you write the check or something along those lines. But I believe it was for a two phase signature approval process originally. I mentioned that we can control that. So if we go to our common code management, and I believe it is yeah, so here's our That's a refund voucher policies. Yeah, I don't think that is actually it. Actually, this, this is stretching my memory for this whole process. But I think we might be, we might need to make a new one and just call it our F, or refund finance or something along those lines. Bret, are you remembering what I'm thinking about here that we kind of can manually override what the refund finance text is? Or maybe I'm thinking about something else like a? Somebody must know when I'm talking. I will remember what I'm talking about, at some point.
Bret Alarcon 35:40
Are you talking about like, common code or user code? Or is it
Zach Malloch 35:44
the refund finance code specifically that says like how long it takes to get that check afterwards, maybe it's in our receive format Profile?
Bret Alarcon 35:57
Can't recall off the top of my head?
Zach Malloch 36:04
Well, anyway, it is somewhere in here. And I'll try to figure that out. And I can let people know in a future session, what that was. Maybe we could even use our Inline help. But I see there's other questions. I don't want to get bogged down on kind of a thing that wasn't actually asked about specifically. So let's go ahead and choose like maybe four or five more, we'll go until 240 or 245. And then we'll we'll wrap up.
Bret Alarcon 36:30
Sure. See, I have a refund that was processed as a refund, now back to a credit card. And we received a notification from PlugnPay, that it was returned, how do we reverse that refund now and change it back to refund finance?
Zach Malloch 36:46
Okay, so the question with correcting most refunds is actually just getting the credit back on to the household. So anyway, you need to do that. I mean, you could, you could take another cash payment, and then, you know, take a payment against a $0 charge. And the system's going to ask are you wanting to add that as a credit to your system, and then it says get a credit balance, and then you can do whatever you want to with it. In this case, what I think you'd probably need to do because it was originally a credit card. And theoretically, now we don't have that tied to the credit card. And they were probably not going to use the credit card did come in and charge anything to put the credit back on the household. So you would probably want to change your credit card Profile assignment to the Novell credit card for yourself. Go in and make a credit card payment on that household for whatever the amount of the credit should be to add their cancer destroying everything. And then that would create the credit and then from that household credit created, you could then choose to refund it as finance from that point. Now, of course, that does mean that you're you're adding that credit in at some point. And so that's going to show on your your cash journal, through the day that you added the credit card balance there at some point, but maybe you're postponing it to the day that that showed that the refund now came out so your so your books look like the refund now came out and then the refund or the the credit went back in and it just netted that to zero, then you will have the credit and you can do whatever you want to with it, leaving it as refund apply or giving the money back as refund finance.
Bret Alarcon 38:29
All right. Missy wants to know, all of our control accounts are all nines. So can you explain where our refunds go when we do each one. Since migration, we had been having some issues with the control account and have a large amount of money in it.
Zach Malloch 38:41
Yeah, so that is indicative of being a RecTrac user for a while. And you know, at certain points, I don't think we ever really went, we never had like a really big campaign to go out and tell everybody that you need to change these or anything and technically you don't need to. The problem with them all being nines is most of the time, especially with what you've got Missy is it's mostly going to be the refund apply account, this is really the only account that holds money in the system. So theoretically, any credits that have that are outstanding for any of your households are going to be the balance that you see in that 999 account. All the transactions that are actually control account and track transactions will go in and out immediately. Refund finance will go in as the refund finance come out as refund finance and the refund now stuff goes in and then comes out immediately. So it's almost guaranteed going to be a refund apply information. So in that case, you know, ideally, we would probably recommend that you split out. So what that could mean is that you just create a new account for your control account, a new one for refund finance and a new one for refund now and just leave the 999 account with that big balance as your refund apply account and then theoretically, as you're getting giving people their credit, balance refunds, it's coming out of that one account. And then all of the new transactions for all those other purposes are separated into these other account numbers. So I'd probably be the way that I would talk about
Bret Alarcon 40:15
Jody has a quick question the tech guy into that, how would you know if you have money in the control account.
Zach Malloch 40:21
So I mean, anytime you need to know, if you have money in any GL Code, you can run a general ledger summary report, if you just want to see what the total is just for that one account. So you go in, and we would do our GL rip reports. Now, let's go to report output management.
Bret Alarcon 40:46
And while we're in reports, Jerry wants to know how to run a report to see what refund applied, what refund applies, we're done week to week
Zach Malloch 40:58
it would be basically the same one. So if we go into System financial, you know, our GL distribution dynamic is what we base our cash on offline. It's what we base our GL distribution summary or do distribution detail. All of those are based on this one report. So we can run this report based on a couple of different settings. And I think actually, we'd have
Bret Alarcon 41:21
Jerry's adding on for check refund finance.
Zach Malloch 41:24
Yeah. So we also have a particular refund report. And actually, this is where I would direct to you for that one, particularly. The other one? Oh, yeah, I have too many Tabs open. So we're at our report, there's our GL distribution report. Real quick, here's our refund Type. So this is how we would say, well, let's do just show me refund finance. And then we have our date range, we choose our modules. And we can see all the refund finances processed between these date ranges, or all the refund applies, or all the refund now is or voids or any combination of those. So the refund report would be where I would point you towards that. The other question was about the GL distribution report. So on the second Screen, we have our GL filters. So I could come down here and I could choose just My Refund apply account. And then on the previous Screen, I would basically do this for all years of your operation. So usually when we talk about like we'll do a specific date, I suppose, actual date. And then we generally consider 1985, to be the the inception of Vermont's systems. So theoretically, nobody has any transactions in their database prior to 1985.
Zach Malloch 42:43
Since the software didn't exist before then, through today, might take a while, but especially if you're doing this as the summary report, GL distribution here, and then we do it as the summary, or actually maybe needs to be the GL distribution dynamic. And the summary, I think that's accurate. In summary, then this would give you all the basically the grand total of all the balance for your control account. Now, theoretically, that should also match your balance. If you run your household Trial Balance report to show you the balances, all households are caring for negative balances. So for credit balances. And so that's a little bit of a proof that you can go back and forth, doesn't always work perfectly. But you always want to make absolutely certain that your date ranges and everything are matching up before you really consider it an issue. It's very easy to run two separate reports and think that you're reporting on the same things. But there's actually a bit of a variation going on. And yeah, so I seem to see is a little bit concerned, there might be something else going on. So yeah, we'll we'll send that information over to support and see if we can have somebody reach out and sort of case for you. I think we're getting towards the end of things. So Oh, yeah. And RecTrac is older than a couple of people on the call today. So that's a special thing about RecTrac as we move forward becomes a legacy system. But yeah, I think that that is going to wrap us up for right now we have Deborah, we have some we'll have somebody reach out for you. And then Missy will have somebody reached out to you about those follow up pieces. Thank you everybody for sticking around that was able to and we will be posting this. And thank you for all your questions and all of the attention. I think unless Bret, or Julia has any closing thoughts. We'll go ahead and wrap that up.
Bret Alarcon 44:39
Well, I don't think we'll see anybody again until next year. So Happy Holidays. Happy New Year.
Zach Malloch 44:44
Yeah. Enjoy the first parts of 2022. Or yeah, that's what's coming up. One of them. Yeah. There's some to some zeros in there. All right. So Bret, I will I think you'll take us out today.
Bret Alarcon 44:58
Yep. All right. Take care everyone
Zach Malloch 45:00
Alright Bye