Please review the following information which is being implemented to nominated customers slowly over the next few months.
With continued efforts towards providing customers with real time balances, we are taking steps to prepare the system. Over the next few months we will be rolling out small, yet significant, changes to items such as transactions (reconciliations) which when combined all other changes will take us on our first step towards the ultimate goal of real-time balances.
First Steps
Beginning this week, we will introduce part 1: live balances derived from capital repayments. From a front-end user perspective there won’t be any great changes, most of the action will take place behind the scenes. One small addition, is the introduction of a new field entitled “System Process Message” that appears at the very bottom of each repayment reconciliation, which will indicate whether the repayment has been successfully processed by the system in real-time, and if so, will appear as “completed” or show an error message if there are any issues with the transaction. As a first step, repayments outside of specified criteria (see below) will be processed in the normal way under the batch payment cycle (your current system process).
The criteria that needs to be met for the repayment to be successfully processed in real-time and update live balances are:
Capital repayments only
Must be a new reconciliation
Cannot be edited - once the repayment or reconciliation has been saved, if it does not meet the real-time requirements, it will be processed by the batch (the current process), this includes if the record is edited.
A change that will become apparent is that each reconciliation will now appear to have an effective date. The effective date will automatically populate from the Bank Statement date, unless it is manually overwritten during the reconciliation process to include an actual Effective Date for the transaction. This small change has been included to facilitate real-time transactions, but should make no difference to the standard reconciliation process. In the example below, users can see that the Effective Transaction Date has been populated to reflect that of the Bank Statement Date (green). Previously, the Effective Transaction Date would have remained blank and the Bank Statement Date would have been utilised, this slight change provides the system with a single place to pull the date from and does not require any additional input from users. The Effective Date will populate automatically and will only need to be changed if the customer requires the use of a different date for the transaction.
The below screenshot shows a reconciliation that meets the criteria and has been processed in real-time. At the very bottom of the page, under the heading System Information, the field System Process Message, shows that this transaction has been successfully “Completed” (yellow). The result of this action being completed means that the loan balance for the associated Loan LN-000161 would immediately reflect the $5 capital repayment that has been processed.
To alleviate confusion the same validations that have been in place previously remain in place on the system, with validations preventing situations such as:
Repayment reconciliations not being able to be processed on a loan that has not yet started or
Where repayments have been cancelled or rejected
Additionally, users may see other messages in the System Process Message box that informs the user that a capital repayment reconciliation has not been processed for a certain reasons. The message box is designed to give users an opportunity to correct any issues for themselves, however, as outlined above, any corrected reconciliations will need to wait for the standard process to run for the transaction to be processed and for the balances to be updated. An example of one such message appears below:
How to use real-time processing
To utilise the real-time transactions function, users can simply process a capital repayment reconciliation as they would at any other time. After saving a record there is a very short lag of between 2 and 5 seconds required for the repayment reconciliation to process and the balances to update, after this time users will need to refresh the screen to see the resulting System Process Message (completed or otherwise). In most circumstances, where users are relying on the Quick Recs Wizard to process Bank Reconciliations, this small time delay will be irrelevant with the refresh happening in the background before the user has even opened up the new reconciliation, however if a message does not appear please refresh the screen first. Once the transaction has met the criteria and been processed, both the loan and facility balances will automatically update. Please be aware that the Account balance will only update after the standard batch process has run.
Known Issues
Real time transactions have been one of our major goals for a long time and this release is the very first step towards fully live balances. To enable this process to work, the real time transaction system needs to work in sync with the standard batch process system. On the very rare occasion where there may be a conflict between the real-time processing and the standard batch processing, where two transactions have been processed for the same loan within a very brief timeframe, a transaction may get out of sync, we are working to solve this and have processes in place to accommodate this. The timeframe at the moment for this potential conflict window is a matter of minutes during the standard batch processing, we ask users to be mindful (in the short term) of what time the standard batch process runs on your system (generally on the hour) and be aware of multiple transactions taking place for the same loan during this time.
Feedback
As this is a first roll out of this new feature, customer communication and feedback is paramount. If you experience any difficulties with the real-time capital repayments process outlined above, if you receive an error that you should not be experiencing, or if it simply doesn’t function as it should per the description above, we request customers to raise a support ticket immediately. It is only with actual real-time use of the system that we are going to be able to iron out any of the creases. Please rest assured that we have also enabled additional background monitoring to catch issues as they may arise.
We look forward to your feedback and have already begun work on part 2, an expansion of the above process.