Preparation Critical For Remittance Professionals

During or after mail extraction, remittance documents, advises and checks must be prepared for the deposit/data capture phase of the workflow. If the items are not properly prepared at this very early stage of the process, a myriad of problems can and will occur that will be very costly. Most of these problems can be eliminated at the earliest stage of the workflow of the processing environment with careful care and attention to details. The workflow and the type of equipment to be used in completing the process dictate how the documents must be prepared. White and low-speed mail require the most preparation whereas high speed mail is, in a way, already prepared for subsequent operations.

Document preparation may be as simple as jogging the documents to ensure even edges, or it may require detailed analysis of the remittance documents to determine the intent of the customer.

Sort processes may include the following:

* Separation by entity to receive the payment (the processor's customer);

* Timeliness of the payment;

* Remittance advice size;

* Single coupon and single check (equal payment amounts/ not equal);

* Multiple coupons and one check (equal/not equal);

* Single coupon and multiple checks (equal/not equal);

* Coupon only no check (has the money already been credited to the biller's account but not applied against the customer's account?);

* Check only, no coupon (does it include account information or not?);

* Post-dated check;

* Credit card payment;

* Foreign check;

* Check payable to another company;

* Courtesy amount and legal amount do not agree;

* Unsigned check;

* Stale-dated check;

Equipment for the automatic processing of remittances requires substantial capital outlay, so the efficiencies offered by the expenditure must be maximized. Improperly prepared documents will result in jams and downtime, which erode cost recovery. Document preparation is essential to efficient remittance processing whether processing, manually or with the most sophisticated equipment available on the market today. It is likely that some labor saved in capture and post-capture will be diverted to the expanded document preparation tasks.

Remittance Data Capture/Deposit Preparation

The retail, wholesale, and wholetail remittance data capture workflows have traditionally been very different, though recent technology is bringing them closer together. Regardless of the method of deposit employed or the type of workflow, the following must occur:

* The information identifying the account to be credited and the amount due/paid must be captured;

* The amount submitted must be compared to the amount due and the amount due verified. The amounts may or may not agree and must be reconciled before deposit. Policy as to how to handle payments for less or more than the amount due must be clearly outlined and understood by both processing and customer service staff;

* Lists of each check and payment advice should be made independently to verify the accuracy of the information captured. In a manual system this may be done on adding machine tapes. In an automated environment, it may be performed in the background by the system;

* Transactions are usually grouped in batches/bundles of convenient size to permit ease of paper flow and points where reconciliation can occur. Totals of these groups are compared to corresponding units of the corresponding elements (i.e. checks to remittance advises);

* After the items are assembled, the total amount of checks for deposit must be reconciled with the total of amounts credited to customer accounts via the remittance advice. Differences must be resolved before the deposit can be completed.

* In an image-based, two-pass automated environment, some checks will not be identified correctly in the second (encoding) pass. Methods of reject/re-entry must be in place to handle these exceptions so that the deposit process can continue. This may take the form of entering the items into a system which will permit the checks to be placed in the original cash letters, or a special cash letter of the repaired items may be required.

The information needed to successfully process a transaction may be as little as account identification and amount paid or may require a large array of data. In the past, the remittance process only captured that information necessary to post and deposit a remittance. Today, detailed demographic data is likely required as well. Today's platforms may permit some of this data to be captured in processes after the remittance process has been completed. However, the image from which this data is to be extracted is likely to be captured in the remittance pass. The system should be configured to "read" as much of the information as possible through the hardware/software configuration. The remittance cycle is normally much shorter and the equipment and software is normally configured to capture only the information necessary to deposit the check in the remittance step.

Note: This is part of an on-going series of articles designed to prepare readers for the Information Capture Professional certification test. Information is extracted from several sources including TAWPI's ICP Handbook and will cover each of the nine sections-Forms Processing, Data Capture, Remittance Processing, Forms Design, Document Management and Workflow, Project Management, Human Resources, Ergonomics and Technology.