Accounts and statements

Mountaintop POS takes the stress and cost out of delivering statements to your financial account holders by bulk emailing and printing owing accounts each month. Additionally, we can automate monthly discounts and/or fees to account holders, which you may find useful if you charge regular fees (like account keeping, packing or methadone fees, for example). Our POS User manual (pg 58, 59) details this, but you’re welcome to call our support if you’d like help. The below FAQ assumes basic accounts knowledge. If you think you need account’s training, please call our support at any time. Training is free and can be delivered on the spot, or organised for a particular date and time.

FAQ

My accounts haven’t aged. Why?
Mountaintop POS User 1, by default, (this behaviour can be changed to be done manually) will automatically age your accounts when it is started in a new month. POS User 1 is almost always the POS installed on your POS server (sometimes known as your main POS). If you accounts haven’t aged, likely you just need to restart Mountaintop POS User 1, wait 15 minutes (for it to do the aging in the background) then check again. The POS will back date an age as necessary, so it doesn’t *need* to be done on the 1st of a new month, only before you issue your statements.

An account’s balance is different to the sum of the account’s profile, and my statements look incorrect. What’s causing that?
A post-transaction has been back dated to a prior statement period, or transactions have been deleted/ undeleted from the profile in a prior balance period. Likely this was done to add or remove something that was present in the profile by mistake.

Changes made to an account’s profile which are posted to a prior balance period (back-dated in other words) *and* where the statement has already been issued *will not* adjust the account balance. This is so we don’t have a discrepancy between the account balance and the issued statement (which is for all intents and purposes, legally, a tax invoice, therefore should not be changed). Account keeping should always be an additive procedure, so the proper way to correct mistakes would be to add a new record in the current balance period.

If you do prefer to modify old information in prior balance periods, you must run the Fix All Balances procedure before reissuing a statement. Accounts > Miscellaneous > Utilities > Fix All Balances. This will ask you to enter your password, and then by default assume a date 60 days prior todays date. You should set this date to any date prior the old transaction you have modified.

How do I set an account to have their statement emailed instead of printed each month?
Your POS must be set up initially to enable the email function. You should call our support to help you set this up if you’ve never emailed accounts before. Once this is set up, you simply write the email address into the Email section of the account. If an email is present, POS will email the statement. If this section is empty, we will print it.

Some customers can’t open the statements I email them.
Almost always the issue will be that you’re using Microsoft Outlook or an Exchange service when sending emails. (which we don’t recommend). This is as Microsoft use a unique email format called HTML and/or rich-text, which can often make the attached statement arrive on the customer’s device as a winmail.dat attachment, which is useless. You’ll probably find customers have this issue if they’re opening their emails on an Apple device (iPhone, iMac, Macbook, etc) as Apple do not support rich text emailing as a general rule.

You can disable rich text emailing from your Microsoft Outlook, however sometimes this won’t make a difference and so we do not rely upon this fix.

More reading: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/change-the-message-format-to-html-rich-text-format-or-plain-text-338a389d-11da-47fe-b693-cf41f792fefa

Instead we recommend using Mozilla Thunderbird as the email client to send your statements from. Our wonderful support staff will be happy to help you set this up. Please know your email address and password when calling, we can not set this up without you being able to enter your correct password.

How can I delete/remove/close an account?
In principle, you shouldn’t. If you delete an account, you are deleting the financial history and customer information from Mountaintop POS. This makes it impossible to track contributions to your finances.

Instead, we recommend suspending the account. Suspending the account disallows new transactions or payments to be made to an account, statements to be printed and won’t list the account in accounts related reports. In other words, functionally you have removed the account from your system, yet you can still track it. This can be done by opening the account via Accounts > Modify, then changing the Susp option to Yes.

If you are sure you wish to delete the account, you can via Accounts > Close Debtor and entering your password, then selecting the account. We have no magical way of recovering account’s which have been deleted, so be very very careful.

How do I configure my statement run each month?
The POS should be configured as follows. POS will remember it’s configuration following each run, so often there is no need to change anything. It’s always advisable to check this before clicking the green OK button in case someone has changed a setting during the month for some reason. You can simply match your settings in POS to the settings below to print and email your statements each month. It’s always good practice to make sure that you have enough paper in your printer prior initiating your statement run.

Review the highlighted areas. Note: We are printing accounts with a Non-Zeo Balance (i.e they owe us money), the Month Just Finished (i.e the balance period which has just finished), we have not selected One Account Only (i.e we will print all statements) and we will Email if Poss else Print (email the statement where an email address is present, otherwise we will print it). Also take note that the Start With Account button is blank, meaning we will start with the first account. If yours is not blank, click the Start With Account button then immediately click the orange Cancel button to reset it to the first account.

My email client pulls up a notification for *every* statement I email, which is driving me crazy. Can I stop this?
Yes, these are settings in your email client.

For Microsoft Outlook (which we don’t recommend) you can turn off these notifications in the Trust Centre > Programmatic Access notifications. Sometimes despite settings being correct here, Outlook will still provide notifications or have the user click send on each email. This is part of the reason we don’t recommend Outlook, and instead recommend Thunderbird. More reading: https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/help/3189806/a-program-is-trying-to-send-an-e-mail-message-on-your-behalf-warning-i

For Mozilla Thunderbird, simply make sure you’ve highlighted your outbox before initiating the statement run from POS.

Only some of my emailed statements seem to be arriving at customers successfully.
You need to determine if the problem is from your end, or if your email is going in to their junk (which would be the customer’s end, and they will need to mark your email address as a safe sender, or your emails as not junk).

If it is your end, likely the issue is that you’re sending out lots of statements via email, *and* that you’re using a free email service from Google or Microsoft (Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook, Live, etc). All of these free services have strict security parameters and if they detect you sending lots of emails in a short time period (i.e sending all of your statements at a particular time) they will think you’re trying to spam people and block your account temporarily. Therefore your emails won’t go through.

There is nothing wrong with using these free services, as there is a way to work around this security requirement. Simply set your email client to OFFLINE mode before sending your statements. This way, Mountaintop POS will dump all of the statements to be sent into your outbox. Then, when you turn the email client back ONLINE, it will email one or two statements at a time as the security parameters allow. You can simply minimise your email client and let it email off your statements in the background. It might take 10 or 20 minutes to get all of your emails sent off if there are a lot of statements to send.

In Outlook, this can be done by clicking the Work Offline button at the top (more reading: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/switch-from-working-offline-to-online-2460e4a8-16c7-47fc-b204-b1549275aac9), and in Thunderbird, online/offline mode can be toggled by clicking the little monitor icons in the very bottom left of the screen.

You can configure Thunderbird to always start in offline mode if you would like to. More reading: https://www.guidingtech.com/2405/access-imap-inbox-offline-thunderbird/