HOWTO Use the Delinquent Program DLQ


DLQ integrates dozens of files and millions of datum to facilitate putting delinquent debt onto Property tax bills.  These bills then become the basis under KRS 109 to aggressively pursue the outstanding debt. 

Each year delinquent debt accumulates for some customers.  Customers are dunned by written notice and newspaper ads.  Some 65-90 days before the designated PVA Property Tax billing date (the day the tax bills are due to be mailed), Notice of Intent (NOI) letters are sent to the delinquent customers, and in the case that they are renters, CC'd to the property owners.  Only those who have been notified 60 days in advance per KRS 109 can be attached to the PVA bill. 

This program permits the user to eyeball all the pertinant data, quicky locate the correct PVA record, and compute the outstanding debt (including recapture of past Amnesty credits).  The debt is then assigned to a PVA account and printed on the tax bill.  As well, the act must be preserved for audit, reporting and tracking.  The results of this program are used to drive the billing when the PVA bills are run.

The Delinquent screen is very busy and crowded. Please follow this tutorial carefully to learn to recognize the data presented and how to properly sequence your lookup to best locate, calculate and assign the outstanding debt.  You will want a pencil and paper to jot down ID #s, and perhaps a printout of the delinquent customers to annotate, as you will discover bad data as you proceed, often in the imported data sets that can only be repaired by other offices.

The rules for choosing debt and determining "good faith efforts to pay" are complicated and set by management, but broadly:  delinquent debtors have met a threshold dollar debt, ignored billing and NOI's, possibly reneged on their Amnesty contract if they have one, and may or may not be making a good faith effort to pay.  Further, there must  be a locatable property tax bill for the debt.  All these must be satisfied to properly attach a Solid Waste Debt to a PVA bill. 

It's important to note that the same debt will appear on the next Solid Waste Bill run too.  Paying the debt, however one is notified,  settles all bills for that debt, so paying the Tax Billed Amount OR the regular Solid Waste bill will satisfy the debt.  Partial payments pay oldest debt first.  Consider the case where  a thousand dollar debt is placed on the Tax Bill, and the client is not paying their monthly regular debt:  if the client pays $1000, they have satisfied their KRS 109 leinable debt, and are relieved of that legal redress.  Had they paid less than $1000, they are still available to KRS 109 redress. 

Locating renters, landowners and their mailing addresses is an ongoing process.  Additional tools and data sets are in the works to better locate rentee/renters, and these can be applied throught the calendar year.   This document is limited to the 90 day period before the PVA Mailing date.

Annual Maintenance
NB:  all of the data presented by DLQ needs to be kept current.  Make a new working directory once each year after the PVA Mailing Date, and  set the desktop icons to reflect the new year.  Near year's end, each year, the FINAL copy of the PVA's "COMPLETE TRIM O_TAX___.DAT" file, typically located in the "/TRIM/O/" directory, must be copied to the working directory.  This file will not be available until the PVA has gotten state certfication, sometime after August, usually.  See the HOWTO Act_Training_TRIM.html for more information.   As well, recent voter lists and phone books can be imported.  One last essential component required each year is the PVA's "TRIM bill print run spool file", made by the TRIM program's bill run under Windows, typically something like: C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\PRINTERS\SPOOL\00001.SPL
where the 00001 may be any #.  Locate the spool file by time and date-they should match the TRIM print run.  You may have one more layer of directories between PRINTERS and SPOOL, depending on your installation.   Copy the *.SPL file to the working directory.

First Time Setup: any new installation may require the browse windows to be sized and placed.

To Begin: LOGIN


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Locate Current SW Accounts

The DLQ program needs to locate your current (this year's) Solid Waste Accounts, typically in a directory either named something like LSW05 or ACT_LEE.  You can inspect the properties of the icon you use to launch the ACT program to locate this directory.  Enter it in the form:  F:\LSW04



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PVA Mailing Date

Enter the planned PVA billing date-this is the date the PVA will mail/postmark the bill, typically October 15.  This date is Very Important to the debt logic.   60 days prior is the NOI cutoff-all NOI's must be mailed before this date.  It also defines the 90 days past due date.  All debts YOUNGER than 90 days are excluded from the debt put on the PVA bill. 

In the event that the PVA changes the mailing date, all the calculations based on the original due date should be recomputed.  This means going back through ALL the Delinquent records, unless you decide to not pursue the new debt that ages past 90 days (because of the new PVA mailing date).  If you forgo the recently aged debt, no recalculations are required.



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The Main Screen

A busy place.  There are 9 "browse" windows visible, 2 not shown, the form Delinquent SW to PVA Bills near the top right corner, and a top menu bar.

The Browse Windows are all tied to the top center one, titled Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME, and as you scroll through this list all others follow.  The delinquent accounts are presented in account order.   This list is the heart of the effort, and in it you reconcile all the debts, dates, and accounts.  Brevity and screen space hide a lot of that information from you, but in fact all the "tagging", calculations and decisions are recorded in the ACT_DLQ.DBF presented in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME window.  This file drives the debt onto the tax bill.

The most important field on the screen is in yellow, below.

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This is the total current debt reported in the MM Corrected copy of the Master Solid Waste Customer file, ACT_CUST.DBF.  In the above screenshot, the  Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list is highlighted in blue, and account 002381 has been tagged by clicking on the name DANNY RAY CAUDILL.  Note that this record shows a commercial property and a residential pickup with a common mailing address.

The form (top right) is detailed below.  It is introduced first to lay out the basic process.  The windows will be decribed next.

The Delinquent SW to PVA Bill Form

Is also busy, with 7 buttons and 10 data fields.  The form's buttons lay out the sequence used to process the current delinquent account.   The form and it's fields need manual refreshing:  data is not updated until you click on a button.  Most fields need their adjacent button pushed to show and/or set the field value.  Push them in the sequence you discover and tag data in the browse windows.  By tagging, I mean to mouse click on the precise record line in the list. When tagged, a small black triangle should appear at the left of the record row.  It's best to tag the source record  then promptly click the button.  More than 5 seconds is too long, as the windows will refresh their data connnections, and your tag may slip.  Again, make a practice of clicking & tagging the window record, then click the form button.


The Form Buttons are listed below, in the basic sequence you'll use them.
Show >90 Day $
d

Once you've scrolled to the delinquent record you want to check out, click this button.  it does the math on debt aging  and puts the result in the field to the right of the button.

Set PVA
d

Look at the Property Tax window & find the best of the good records and tag it.  Now click the Set PVA button to tie the debt to this PVA account.  Several PVA fields are then copied to the ACT_DLQ.DBF record, like the map number, name, account and description.

Show DLQ's Credits
d

This assembles and sorts ancestral ACT_PAY.DBF credit (T type) records by dollar amount.  Amnesty credits for the current account are presented in dollar order.  If present, tag the amnesty credit and close the browse window.

DeCredit
d


Inspect this years payments and determine if the client's good faith efforts earn a defferal of the amnesty recapture.


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If they get warrent good faith, do not click DeCredit.  If they have an Amnesty Credit tagged and do not warrent relief, click DeCredit, and the amount credited will be attached to the total debt.

Show Total
d

Click this anytime to run the calculations and present a grand total debt.  Click this before Charge to Bill.

Charge to Bill
d


This is the commit step that writes the displayed values to the data files.  You can use the menu UnCharge button to clear a mistaken charge.  Tag the Delinquent record first, then click UnCharge. Once you have charged an account, the m becomes M in the Dlq_hist field of the Solid Waste Account. 


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If you click on the word Memo, you will see the delinquency history for the account you just processed.



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Look up ID
The Lookup is informational, and this is NOT the place to set debts or tag a PVA Bill.  Use the look up to check out related accounts for PVA records, Amnesty Credits, etc, but be sure to return to your original Delinquent SW Account record in the top middle window before you use the form or menu to alter data. 

Enter an account number in the field to the left of the Look Up ID button, then press the button.  All the related records for the account you entered will be displayed.

If a delinquent account has the wrong account number, edit the value in the Pickup_ID field to correct it:  click back in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list window, and there find the offending client, edit the Pickup_ID field for that client in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list, and fix the ID #. 

DO NOT use the Delinquent SW to PVA Bills form or it's buttons to tag things when you are just Looking Up IDs.  Only use the form's buttons when you have the right Delinquent customer showing in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list.



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The other windows are:

SW:  Find Inactives

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Shows SW accounts by both names (last+first).  Look here to see the Inactive/Active status and account #'s.  If you see a second account you can use the Look Up ID button on the form to check out the account # to see if it has an outstanding balance, an amnesty credit,  or any Comments.  This is detailed below.   Please Note:  This Lookup is informational, and this is NOT the place to set  debts or tag a PVA Bill.  In the event that the  Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list ID number is wrong, or points to the Inactive account, click back in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list window, and there find the offending client, EDIT THE RECORD FOR THAT CLIENT in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list, and fix the ID #. 

DO NOT use the Delinquent SW to PVA Bills form or it's buttons to tag things when you are just Looking Up IDs.  Only use the form's buttons when you have the right Delinquent customer showing in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list.

Master Solid Waste Account

Shows the current Solid Waste record for the ID# of the current Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME record.  The Comment field may have useful information.  Click 2x on it to read the comments.

NOI'd

Shows the Name and Account # that received a Notice of Violation.  This is just for confirmation, but should you fail to see the same value as in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list, there is an error and you need to investigate it before tagging any debts.

Solid Waste Account (Copy with MM Fixed Addressing)

Shows a recent copy of the Master Solid Waste accounts with Mail Man corrected addresses-these match better in street name comparisons and are used to locate PVA records by address.

Property Tax Only -Not Tangible/Intangible

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Shows the current Complete TRIM record from the PVA's O_TAX___.DAT file.  This is a copy of the PVA's account, and much data is made visible by moving the window's bottom slider to the right.  The valuations are  about 1/4 of the way across the record, choose the largest if you are presented with a choice of PVA records to tag.  Only the four columns that start with Re_ have values of  consquence here.

Payment Records for Master SW Account

Show this year's payment records to determine the "good faith effort to pay".

Voter Registration List

Records listed here share the same mailing address as the Property Tax record-you may find the SW debtor's name here, corroborating the link to the SW account.

2000 Phone Book

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Like the Voter list,  records here add individual names to corroborate the link from the SW account to the PVA account.


The Two Windows Not Shown

Show the results of the AmnestyCredit record search,  and the PVA Tax bill as printed to the TRIM spool file.  The first window comes up when you click on the Show DLQ Credits button and covers the Delinquent SW to PVA Bills form.  While open, it shows all credits since 1997 (or your start of ACT record keeping) sorted by amount.  If the SW customer has ever received a credit to the account ID shown in the Delinquent SW Account ID/NAME list, that credit will be listed.  Amnesty credits tend to be large and will sort to the top.  Verify the Amnesty credit once you've located a likely credit record by checking the Amnesty Receipt paper file.  Once you'e made the determination on the amnesty credit,  highlight the correct record in the credit record & close the  window to reveal the data form.  Click on the DeCredit button to charge the amnesty credit to the Delinquent account. 

At Press Time, no entry is made in the Master SW accounts to reflect this charge-you must make an invoice to each account you DeCredit.







The Menu

You can use the menu UnCharge button to clear a mistaken charge.  Tag the Delinquent record first, then click UnCharge.

Use the View Tax Bill button to show any matching tax bill from the TRIM print run spool file.  Not all PVA accounts are billed, so you may meet the occaision where no bill is being generated. 

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Annual Events is largely described in another document, Act_Train_TRIM.html.

Prev/Next  move you up or down in a list.

List & Windows offers a menu line for each window so you can re-open one in case you close it.

Quit quits.