If you receive an overpayment from a customer, it is easy to apply the extra amount paid to their account while you are posting their payment. You simply enter the Received amount and UtilAbility will automatically distribute that amount, paying each service in full. Once the services are paid in full, however, you are left with the Remaining amount that they have overpaid. UtilAbility does not know how you wish to distribute that remaining amount, so it is up to you to distribute among their services as you wish. You simply apply the amount you wish to pay to each service in its Pay Amt column.
If you know how much you want to apply, and you do not wish to do the math to add it to the amount already applied, you can simply enter your additional amount followed by the + sign and your additional amount will be added to what is already there. Once you have distributed the full amount Received, the remaining will show 0.00 and you can post their payment. After you have posted their payment, any extra amounts that you distributed will show up as a credit or a negative amount due for each service.
When you calculate your next bill, these credits will be consumed by new amounts that are added from the calculation. But, what happens when your new amount due is less than the credit balance for any given service? The credit will be reduced by the new amount billed and the new service balance will show the remaining credit.
It is important to be mindful in the way you distribute your overpayments. For instance, if you applied your overpayments in such a way that results in some services not having enough credit to cover their new bill, then those service balances will remain positive while other services may have had enough or even had excess credit after their original credit has paid their balance in full. In this case, once again, UtilAbility does not know how you wish to distribute the remaining (excess) credits, so it is up to you to distribute them in the Post Cash Receipts function. You can distribute any credit in full by setting its Pay Amt Column to the same value as the credit (negative amount) and then applying that same amount, reversed (positive), to any other services. If you want to distribute part of a credit, simply set the Pay Amt column of the service with the credit to the amount (again negative) you wish to remove from the credit and then apply that same amount, reversed (positive), to any other services.
Finally, if you have your services split to use multiple Late Charges, it may be especially important to distribute your extra credits before you next calculate those Late Charges. If you don’t, and an account has an amount due for services(s) identified with one particular Late Charge and they have a credit due for service(s) identified with another particular Late Charge, they may end up with Additional Late Charges, even if they paid on time.