Known Problems ​

GAS MANager isn't without its issues, some of which cannot be easily addressed by CDC. You should be aware of these issues so that you can work around them.

Unpaid Penalties Can Mess Up Future Penalties ​

This problem usually goes unnoticed until a customer with a long history of underpaying bills doesn't get a penalty despite having a balance owing. The problem is actually much deeper. Due to a design flaw, GAS MANager doesn't properly handle penalties.

If your organization uses the open invoice A/R method, doesn't charge penalties on penalties (which is the law), and you have customers that regularly underpay, then you have this problem.

The issue is that GAS MANager ignores unreconciled past penalties for the purposes of computing a new penalty. So if a customer has previous penalties totalling $100, their new penalty will be on $100 less than their balance owing. This isn't completely wrong, but it is mostly wrong. If their unreconciled penalties total more than their balance, they will receive no penalty at all. This is completely wrong.

How do you work around this problem? First, hound customers to pay their balance to $0. Second, by making every effort to reconcile transactions. This only has to be done on accounts that continually underpay. There are two ways to achieve this:

1. Split payments to reconcile with transactions, prioritizing penalties.
2. Make an artificial payment to bring the account balance to $0, then reverse they payments.

As an example of splitting payments, let's say you have an account with a previous penalty of $10, and a bill for $30, for a balance of $40. You receive a payment for $35. If the payment is applied in full, neither the penalty or the bill will be reconciled. Our recomendation is that penalties are prioritized. In this case, the payment would be split into $10, to reconcile with the penalty, with the remaineder being $25. By prioritizing payments to penalties, this problem can usually be eliminated altogether, over time.

Compared to entering a payment normally, this is a lot of work. One has to know which accounts have this problem, look at their transactions to figure out how much penalty can be paid off with the current payment, total the penalties, make a payment for that amount, and the remainder, and finally go into the account's transactions to reconcile the penalties against the payment.

As an example of the artificial payment strategy, let's say we use the same account (with a penalty of $10 and a bill for $30). As in the first example, the customer pays $35, leaving them with a balance of $5. In this case, we would make a payment of $5, bringing the account balance to $0 and reconciling all the transactions. We would then reverse the $5 payment with a negative $5 payment. This would leave the account with the correct balance.

It is best to have a separate transaction type, perhaps called 'Reconcile', for this strategy. The total of that transaction type should always be $0, which makes checking for errors a simple matter.

CDC recognizes how problematic this issue is. We are working to change how penalties are calculated, properly taking previous penalties into account and altother eliminating this issue.